New Jersey software error adds roughly 6,600 noncitizens to voter rolls

New Jersey finds roughly 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly added to its voter rolls after a software error at the state motor vehicles department, Governor Mikie Sherrill said, with fewer than 400 of those registrations linked to ballots cast since mid-2023. The glitch, she said, ran for about a year and affected people who had explicitly indicated they were not US citizens.

According to The Independent, Sherrill said she learned of the problem last week and ordered the registrations removed, while also moving to replace the vendor behind the motor-vehicle system. The governor, who took office after the period in which the flaw was active, described the affected individuals as having done nothing wrong, and said the registrations included Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters across the state.

The episode lands inside a national dispute over election administration where technical systems do quiet, high-volume work and political actors treat the outputs as proof of intent. In practice, motor-vehicle databases are designed for licensing and residency information, then repurposed as a pipeline into voter registration under “motor voter” rules; when the pipeline misfires, the error propagates across multiple agencies before anyone notices. A state can remove names, but it still has to explain how a system accepted an explicit noncitizen attestation and produced a voter record anyway.

The Independent notes that President Donald Trump has been pressing to identify and reduce noncitizen voting ahead of the November 2024 congressional elections, while courts have blocked administration efforts to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive personal data. That pushes the dispute toward blunt instruments: federal pressure for broader access to voter files, and state promises of “transparency” paired with vendor changes and internal fixes that the public cannot easily audit.

Reuters analysis cited by the paper has found that noncitizen voting violations are often inadvertent, driven by misinformation or confusion. But the New Jersey case shows a different vulnerability: not a rogue voter, but a software path that can manufacture eligibility at scale, then leave officials arguing over how many ballots it actually produced.

Sherrill said fewer than 400 ballots were cast by those mistakenly registered. The state is now removing the registrations and replacing the vendor that built the system that created them.