New Jersey’s motor vehicle system asked applicants whether they were American citizens.
About 6,600 said no.
The software registered them to vote anyway.
Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed the stunning failure Tuesday, announcing an independent investigation after state officials determined that a Motor Vehicle Commission error placed thousands of self-identified noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024.
Fewer than 400 people registered through the faulty process later cast ballots, according to the state’s preliminary review.
That figure does not yet prove 400 noncitizens voted illegally. Investigators must determine whether any affected individuals became naturalized citizens before voting, whether records were matched correctly and whether the ballots were legally cast.
Sherrill said officials have not found evidence that an election result changed.
“We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” the governor said.
Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals…
— Governor Mikie Sherrill (@GovSherrillNJ) July 21, 2026
Still, the revelation hands President Trump powerful new ammunition in his campaign for tighter voter-roll verification and tougher election-security standards.
The error occurred when people applying for driver’s licenses or identification cards answered “no” when asked if they were US citizens. Despite that response, a software malfunction allegedly transmitted their information for voter registration.
New Jersey’s own Motor Vehicle Commission says only eligible applicants may register through its offices.
Sherrill said she learned about the problem July 15 and ordered her chief counsel to investigate. Her administration also hired an outside firm, began removing or reviewing the affected registrations and started replacing the vendor responsible for the system.
“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,” Sherrill said in a statement reported by Axios.
“This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now,” she added.
The malfunction predates Sherrill’s governorship, but its discovery puts her administration at the center of a national fight over noncitizen registration and voting.
Trump has repeatedly argued that states lack sufficient safeguards to prevent ineligible registrations. His administration recently sent New Jersey a letter claiming that approximately 35,000 people on the state’s rolls may be noncitizens.
Sherrill said New Jersey has asked the administration to show its work.
“We have asked them for any evidence of this, where they got that number, who this is,” she said. “We’ve received nothing back yet.”
The confirmed 6,600-person software error does not validate the administration’s separate 35,000 figure. It does, however, demonstrate that thousands of ineligible registrations can enter a state database through a technical failure even when applicants answer the citizenship question correctly.
Sherrill bristled at Trump’s efforts to use election-security vulnerabilities as a political weapon.
“I think that Donald Trump has done more to undermine free elections in this country than certainly anyone in my lifetime, including Vladimir Putin,” she said.
But the partisan broadside does not make the software failure disappear.
The state must now determine why the system disregarded applicants’ answers, how the malfunction continued for roughly a year, whether officials detected it earlier and whether any of the ballots tied to those registrations were cast by people who remained ineligible.
It must also explain how the error escaped existing safeguards designed to prevent precisely this outcome.
Most of the 6,600 registrants did not vote. The number who did represents a small share of the state electorate, and Sherrill says no result appears to have been affected.
Election integrity, however, is not measured only by whether a mistake changes a winner. It also depends on whether the system catches ineligible registrations before ballots are cast.
New Jersey’s system asked the right question. Then it ignored the answer.
BREAKING: New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill says a software glitch in the state's motor vehicle system mistakenly registered about 6,600 non-U.S. citizens to vote when they applied for driver's licenses or state ID cards.
According to Sherrill, the applicants correctly indicated… pic.twitter.com/ZODKaGUdJ0
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 21, 2026
More over at The Wall Street Journal:
New Jersey has removed about 6,600 non-U.S. citizens from its voter rolls after the state learned that a serious software error led to their registrations https://t.co/NmagOwngrb
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 21, 2026
