By Doina Chiacu
July 21 (Reuters) – Roughly 6,600 people who were not U.S. citizens were accidentally added to New Jersey’s voter rolls because of a software error at the state motor vehicles department, but fewer than 400 actually cast ballots in elections since 2023, Governor Mikie Sherrill said on Tuesday.
The announcement comes as President Donald Trump, a Republican, has undertaken an aggressive push before November congressional elections to identify and mitigate voting by noncitizens, which experts have long determined was not a significant problem in American elections.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, said she learned last week of the software mistake in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System in which people who had indicated they were not U.S. citizens were registered as voters anyway between June 2023 and June 2024. The individuals did nothing wrong and were mistakenly registered “through no fault of their own,” she said.
The state’s preliminary analysis showed that fewer than 400 of those 6,600 – Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated people who were scattered across the state – actually voted. Sherrill said she has ordered the removal of those individuals who were mistakenly added to the voter rolls and will replace the vendor responsible for the error, which occurred before she took office.
“As the Trump administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring we protect our elections,” Sherrill said in a statement. “The difference is simple: when we find a problem, we don’t hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public. That’s what accountability and good governance look like, and that’s exactly what my administration is doing.”
Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are untrustworthy and non-citizen voting is widespread.
Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election. A Reuters data analysis revealed that voting violations by noncitizens were often inadvertent, the result of misinformation from others or confusion on their part.
Last week, the Trump administration threatened state officials with fines and criminal charges if they do not comply with election security measures, including providing the federal government with unredacted voter rolls.
New Jersey was one of four states that were asked last week by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to review their voter rolls. He said there were more than 250,000 potential violations in the four, which included California, Nevada and Pennsylvania, but did not provide evidence or say what criteria the department used to identify those.
“Looking forward to working with you to secure your elections in the future,” Mullin said Tuesday in a post on X addressing Sherrill’s announcement.
Courts have blocked Trump administration efforts to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls, which contain sensitive, personally identifiable information about residents.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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