Roughly 6,600 non-citizens were accidentally registered on New Jersey voter rolls following a software error in the state’s Motor Vehicle System, Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced on Tuesday.
The error occurred between June 2023 and June 2024, resulting in thousands of individuals who indicated they were not citizens when applying for identification documents being accidentally added to voter rolls, Sherrill explained in a lengthy post on X.
Fewer than 400 of those who were registered voted, according to a “preliminary analysis,” Sherrill wrote.
“We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” she said at a press conference.
The window during which the non-citizens were registered preceded Sherrill’s tenure as governor. Sherrill, who took office in January, announced she has ordered the removal of the non-citizens who were added to the voter rolls.
The announcement comes as President Donald Trump has continued to promote false claims that widespread fraud poses a major threat in U.S. elections ahead of the fall midterms, despite research showing that non-citizen voting and other forms of fraud are extraordinarily rare.
Read More: Trump Keeps Railing Against Non-Citizen Voting. Research Shows It’s Extremely Rare
Sherrill addressed Trump’s claims regarding voter fraud directly when announcing the error in New Jersey.
“Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” she said, accusing the President of working to “undermine Americans’ faith in our elections.”
In a speech to the nation last week, Trump again pushed the narrative that U.S. election integrity is weak, announcing that what he characterized as “critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” would immediately be declassified and made public.
But in a review of the materials released by the Administration, The Associated Press found that they did not substantiate Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, or that China or other countries manipulated U.S. elections.
Read More: 5 Takeaways From Trump’s Speech on Elections
Ahead of Trump’s speech, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it had found thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls in four states, including New Jersey, where it claimed there were 35,152 of such cases. The other states included California, where the department said it had identified 190,832 non-citizens who were registered; Nevada, with an alleged 15,903; and Pennsylvania, with 14,576.
DHS said the findings were based on “preliminary reviews” of state records. The department did not release the data behind the numbers it announced or detail how it had reached those figures. It also did not specify how many of the registered voters, if any, had cast ballots in U.S. elections.
More than 6.6 million voters are registered in the state of New Jersey, meaning that the 6,600 non-citizens who were added to the rolls as a result of the software error amount to less than 0.1 percent of the total. The figure of 35,152 shared by DHS would also represent a fraction of a fraction of all the state’s registered voters: about half of one percent.
“I want to underscore how seriously I take this matter,” Sherrill said on Tuesday. “I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time. This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now. I am taking action to prevent anything like it from occurring in the future and make sure those responsible are held accountable.”
