New Jersey Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill stood at a podium this week and admitted that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were added to the state's voter rolls through what she called a "serious software error in New Jersey's Motor Vehicle System." Fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots.
Then she blamed a French tech company. The French tech company blamed her.
The error, which occurred between June 2023 and June 2024 — entirely under former Democratic Governor Phil Murphy's watch — registered noncitizens who had explicitly indicated "no" on the citizenship question. They checked the box saying they weren't citizens. The system registered them anyway. As Democrats, as Republicans, as unaffiliated voters, scattered across the state.
Sherrill said she was "appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen." Strong words from the governor of a state that spent years insisting noncitizen voting was a conspiracy theory.
The company in question is IDEMIA, a French multinational identity-security firm that had worked with the New Jersey DMV for more than 40 years. Sherrill's office pointed at IDEMIA as the source of the glitch. IDEMIA fired back, telling Fox News Digital that its role was simply to "transmit information through the motor vehicle system" and that "the voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State." In other words: we move the data, you decide what to do with it.
New Jersey and IDEMIA will no longer be working together. Which is a convenient way to bury the question of who actually built the system that ignored a clear "no" on a citizenship checkbox for twelve straight months.
The Justice Department, under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has launched a federal investigation through the Civil Rights Division. NJ Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio, a Republican from Hackettstown, called it "another example of Democrats failing to secure elections." The Republican National Committee noted the irony: "In the same speech where she admits over 6,000 non-citizens were registered to vote," Sherrill still couldn't bring herself to endorse the kind of safeguards that would prevent it from happening again.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson drove the nail: "Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register."
That's the real headline here. Not the software glitch. Not the blame game between Trenton and a French contractor. The story is that for years, anyone who raised concerns about noncitizen voter registration was called a conspiracy theorist, a xenophobe, a threat to democracy. The standard Democratic line — repeated on cable news, in congressional hearings, in court filings opposing the SAVE America Act — was that noncitizen voting simply does not happen. The system won't allow it.
The system allowed it 6,600 times in one state in one year.
Sherrill's "appalled" routine would land better if her own party hadn't spent the last decade blocking every piece of legislation designed to catch exactly this kind of failure. The SAVE America Act, which would have required proof of citizenship for federal voter registration, was treated like a Republican power grab. Now we know what it actually was: a fix for a system that was already broken.
Governor Sherrill says she's disgusted by the failure of the outgoing vendor. The vendor says it just moved data where the state told it to go. The previous governor's office is silent. And 6,600 people who told the state of New Jersey they were not citizens ended up on the voter rolls.
That's not a software error. That's an architecture problem.