New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Says a DMV Software Bug Put 6,600 Noncitizens on the Voter Rolls — Nearly 400 of Them Voted.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced July 21, 2026 that a software defect in the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission system registered roughly 6,600 people who had indicated they were not U.S. citizens to vote anyway, between June 2023 and June 2024. Fewer than 400 of them actually cast a ballot.
The bug ran under Sherrill’s predecessor, Phil Murphy (D). Sherrill says she learned of it only recently, has ordered her chief counsel to investigate, and is purging the affected registrations and replacing the MVC’s registration vendor.
The announcement lands five days after the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security separately flagged a much larger, disputed figure — more than 35,000 potential noncitizens on New Jersey’s rolls under a different federal data-matching program. The two numbers measure different things and should not be confused with each other.
- 6,600 — people registered to vote despite marking 'not a U.S. citizen' on an MVC form, June 2023–June 2024 — Gov. Sherrill's office
- Fewer than 400 — of those 6,600 who actually cast a ballot in a past election — Gov. Sherrill's office
- 35,152 — separate, contested DHS SAVE-program estimate of potential NJ noncitizen registrations — a different figure, not to be merged with the 6,600
- 2018 — the year NJ enacted automatic, opt-out voter registration through the MVC — the legislative backdrop that let a DMV software bug reach the voter rolls
According to Sherrill’s office, the problem traces to a specific defect in the Motor Vehicle Commission’s driver’s-license and ID application system. Applicants who answered “no” to the citizenship question — explicitly telling the state they were not U.S. citizens — were registered to vote regardless. The defect was active for roughly a year, June 2023 through June 2024, and was corrected at the software level in 2024 without the erroneous registrations themselves being identified or removed at that time.
The reason a DMV software error can put someone on the voter rolls at all traces back to 2018, when New Jersey enacted automatic, opt-out voter registration through the MVC under then-Gov. Phil Murphy (D). Under that system, anyone applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state ID is registered to vote by default unless they affirmatively decline — which means a single software defect in that pipeline can silently register thousands of people the law never intended to register, including, in this case, people who had just told the state they weren’t citizens.
“This failure didn't occur under my watch, but accountability starts now.”
Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ)
Sherrill’s 6,600 figure is the third distinct noncitizen-voter-roll number to surface in New Jersey this summer, and the site treats all three separately rather than blending them into one statistic. On June 8, 2026, the New Jersey Republican State Committee’s election-integrity task force said county-level public-records requests had turned up “hundreds” of self-reported noncitizen registrations. On July 16–17, 2026, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R) notified New Jersey and three other states that a federal data-matching program called SAVE had flagged a far larger number — roughly 35,152 potential noncitizens on New Jersey’s rolls, part of a four-state total near 250,000. That federal estimate is itself disputed: a WRAL fact-check quotes state election officials in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Texas describing the SAVE system as prone to false positives, and DHS’s own figure is a preliminary data match, not a confirmed count of actual noncitizens.
Sherrill’s announcement came five days after the DHS letter, though none of the reporting reviewed for this piece establishes that the federal notice is what prompted her disclosure — her office has presented it as a self-identified, internal finding. Republicans in the state legislature weren’t inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt regardless. Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio (R) said: “This is another example of Democrats failing to secure elections. If Democrats would embrace voter ID... the MVC’s voter registration failures would have been corrected at the ballot box.”
Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) — announced the 6,600-registration MVC software error July 21, 2026; ordered an investigation and a purge.
Phil Murphy (D) — governor during the bug's active window (June 2023–June 2024) and the administration that signed NJ's 2018 automatic voter registration law.
Dale Caldwell (D) — NJ Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State; received DHS's July 16 notification letter.
Markwayne Mullin (R) — DHS Secretary; announced the separate, larger, contested four-state SAVE-program estimate.
John DiMaio (R) — NJ Assembly Minority Leader; called the disclosure proof of Democratic election-security failures.
Harmeet Dhillon (R) — Assistant Attorney General, DOJ Civil Rights Division; opened a formal probe the same day Sherrill's disclosure went public.
The Justice Department moved within hours. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (R), who leads DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent New Jersey a letter the same day Sherrill disclosed the MVC bug — demanding the state preserve every record tied to the disclosure and produce, within five business days, full names, dates of birth, nationality, address, and registration date and location for all roughly 6,600 flagged registrants, plus voting date, location, and mail-ballot signature data for the nearly 400 who cast a ballot. Dhillon folded the new figures into an existing federal lawsuit DOJ already has pending against New Jersey seeking the state’s complete, unredacted electronic voter-registration list — this is new ammunition in ongoing litigation, not a standalone case. “Ensuring that U.S. citizens’ votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizens’ votes is of paramount importance,” Dhillon wrote.
The disclosure also reopened an argument that’s been running since June, when The Federalist first reported “hundreds” of noncitizens found on New Jersey’s rolls and NJ GOP Chairwoman Christine Giordano (R) said some counties still hadn’t turned over full documentation. On cable, the fight was more combative. CNN contributor Scott Jennings pressed anchor Abby Phillip on NewsNight over what he called Democrats’ tolerance for the problem: “What’s your tolerance for this? My bar is I want no tolerance. I have zero tolerance... This is a convenient deflection for you. This is the worst possible story that could happen for Democrats right now — 6,600 illegal aliens in New Jersey that you know about!” Phillip pushed back that the real question was scale, not tolerance: “This is not about tolerance, this is about widespread, or is it something that is relatively rare.”
CNN’s own Jake Tapper broke from the network’s house line, telling viewers the disclosure was “not good for Democrats’ argument that there’s no such thing as undocumented immigrants voting.” Twitchy and other conservative outlets circulated an older Tapper clip downplaying election-security concerns as a contrast — that flashback comment predates this story and should be read as a prior position, not a same-day statement.
Now, Jake Tapper says: 'This is not good for Democrats' argument that there's no such thing as undocumented immigrants voting.' Jake was previously busy helping further the narrative that non-citizen voting wasn't a serious issue.
None of this resolves the underlying dispute over how big New Jersey’s noncitizen-voter problem actually is — Sherrill’s 6,600, DHS’s contested 35,152, and the NJGOP’s earlier “hundreds” remain three separate, non-additive figures. What’s new as of July 22 is that DOJ now has a formal discovery demand in motion, and the story has moved from a state-level disclosure to a national cable argument about how seriously either party takes it.
The cable argument kept going into a second day. On MS NOW (the rebranded MSNBC), Molly Jong-Fast told viewers that President Trump (R) was “trying to use non-citizens voting in New Jersey to prove a point that doesn’t exist” — a formulation critics on X immediately flagged as self-defeating, since the 6,600-registration figure at the center of this story came from Gov. Sherrill’s own administration, not from Trump. “Despicable that someone would use evidence to prove something exists,” one widely shared reply read; another simply called it “mental gymnastics.”
Commentators tracking CNN’s coverage across the week described a three-step drift in the network’s own framing: first, that voter fraud “doesn’t happen”; then, once Sherrill’s numbers landed, that fraud happened but wasn’t “widespread”; then, that the noncitizens who did vote were most likely “confused,” not fraudulent. That progression tracks the same Abby Phillip exchange with Scott Jennings covered in the July 22 update above, not a separate on-air moment — the “shifting goalposts” framing is commentary on how that one exchange has been characterized after the fact, not a new CNN segment.
A New Jersey DMV software bug let roughly 6,600 people who told the state they weren’t citizens register to vote anyway, and nearly 400 of them cast a ballot before anyone noticed. The bug ran under a Democratic governor, was disclosed by his Democratic successor, and traces back to a 2018 automatic-registration law that turned a routine software defect into an election-integrity failure. It is one of three separate noncitizen-voter-roll numbers now circulating about New Jersey this summer — and, this piece argues, the only one so far that a state government has actually confirmed itself.
