Gov. Mikie Sherrill says motor vehicle vendor is responsible for issues beyond N.J. voter registration error
The governor described “disarray” at the Motor Vehicle Commission beyond the glitch that caused thousands of nocitizens to become registered to vote.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill revealed Thursday that her administration had already been trying to get rid of the vendor that she blames for thousands of illegal voter registrations in the state before she discovered the misstep.
Sherrill, a first-term Democrat, announced Tuesday that she had learned almost a week earlier that about 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024 under her predecessor, former Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. She said fewer than 400 of those people had voted.
The news coincided with President Donald Trump’s effort to revive conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In an attempt to bolster his proposal for a national overhaul of elections, his administration has alleged large numbers of noncitizens are registered in a handful of states.
Sherrill said a glitch in software at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC) operated by a vendor called IDEMIA registered people to vote through the state’s automatic motor vehicle voter registration program even after they identified themselves as noncitizens.
The term noncitizen can refer to people who are in the United States legally on green cards or visas as well as undocumented people, who have been able to get driver’s licenses in New Jersey since 2021. The state has allowed citizens to register to vote automatically at the MVC since 2018 unless they opt out.
“I think it’s well known that the motor vehicle commission has been a mess, and IDEMIA is at the heart of that,” Sherrill said after a news conference Thursday.
Sherrill said in remarks on Tuesday that her administration would replace the vendor but did not discuss the depth of her issues with the company before the recent scandal. She focused her criticism on the administration of her predecessor, Murphy, who has remained publicly silent on the issue.
But on Thursday, the governor took more aim at IDEMIA.
» READ MORE: How 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in New Jersey and what happens next
She blamed the company for long waits, bureaucracy, and red tape, and said she had already viewed the MVC as a “failure” prior to this incident. She said New Jerseyans have been told to get a passport because it would be faster than the process of getting a REAL ID in New Jersey, one of which is required for travel to avoid extra fees.
“That’s the disarray that was going on there,” she said.
Sherrill said Rosalie Johnson, whom she said she recruited from Colorado to appoint as the new MVC administrator this year, “was already in the process of removing them for their incompetence.”
Johnson said Tuesday that her team has already made improvements at the MVC, is implementing additional safeguards, and is “actively working with a new vendor to ensure this type of technical malfunction does not happen in the future.” She said she expects the new vendor to begin next year.
Additionally, Sherrill said her administration hired an independent firm to investigate what happened.
In a separate news conference Thursday, New Jersey Republicans said an independent, bipartisan committee with subpoena power should also investigate the circumstances that led to the faulty registrations.
New Jersey GOP chair Christine Hanlon said she believes there may be more instances of noncitizens improperly registered than what Sherrill disclosed.
According to a sampling of data collected by the state party, she said, there were “hundreds” of noncitizens who had proactively requested to be removed from the voter rolls outside the time frame between 2023 and 2024. Not every county provided data, so the results show an incomplete picture, she said.
“It just shows us we need a lot more information about what happened and when,” she said.
Federally, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a post on X that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice “is investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes.” U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a North Jersey Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for governor last year, called for a national audit of IDEMIA.
IDEMIA released a statement Tuesday blaming the improper voter registrations on the New Jersey Department of State’s Division of Elections, saying the department is “ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote.”
The company’s responsibility was to transmit information from the motor vehicle system to the New Jersey Department of State, but the information “must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections,” the statement said. IDEMIA did not respond to a request for further comment on Thursday.
Sherrill blasted the company’s justification on Thursday.
“To suggest somehow that the fact that they had a huge software error like this for a year that they did not catch is somehow not something they were responsible for, I mean, this is why we’re getting rid of them,” she said.
