New Jersey Admitted 6,600 Noncitizens Were Registered to Vote. Fewer Than 400 Actually Cast a Ballot — and the State Won’t Hand Over the Rest of the List.
On July 21, 2026, Governor Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) disclosed that roughly 6,600 people had been improperly registered to vote in New Jersey — the result of a Motor Vehicle Commission software error that ran from June 2023 to June 2024, entirely under her predecessor, Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ). Of those 6,600, New Jersey’s own count says fewer than 400 actually cast a ballot.
Sherrill called the failure “reckless” and blamed “the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time.” But when the U.S. Department of Justice demanded the full, unredacted list of names within five business days, Sherrill’s administration refused to hand it over — and Secretary of State Dale Caldwell (D) is now the named defendant in the federal lawsuit that followed.
New Jersey’s own numbers — 6,600 registered, fewer than 400 voted — are confirmed. Every figure larger than that, from Homeland Security’s 35,152 to the 278,000 cited nationally, is disputed, and fact-checkers have already found the methodology behind it unreliable.
- 6,600noncitizensimproperly registered to vote via a Motor Vehicle Commission software error — Gov. Sherrill's July 21 disclosure
- <400actually votedof the 6,600, per New Jersey's own count — the figure now at the center of DOJ's demand for the full list
- 2023–24the windowthe MVC error ran from June 2023 to June 2024 — entirely under Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ)
- 5business daysDOJ's deadline for New Jersey to produce the full unredacted voter data, per AAG Harmeet Dhillon's July 21 letter
- 6.9Mregistered votersstatewide in New Jersey — the scale against which 6,600 and <400 sit
Sherrill’s July 21 statement, posted on New Jersey’s official government site, is the only account of this story anyone can point to with an actual state document behind it. Her office says a software defect inside the Motor Vehicle Commission’s voter-registration system ran for roughly a year, from June 2023 to June 2024, and let noncitizens who visited MVC offices for driver’s licenses or ID cards get funneled into the voter file when they shouldn’t have been. Roughly 6,600 people were swept up. New Jersey’s own review found that fewer than 400 of them actually cast a ballot in any election during that window.
Set against New Jersey’s roughly 6.9 million registered voters and the more than 4 million ballots cast in the 2024 presidential election alone, the confirmed numbers are small — real, but a fraction of a percent. Sherrill ordered the MVC’s vendor replaced and installed a new administrator at the agency.
“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.”
Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) — July 21, 2026
The timeline does Sherrill a favor: the defect predates her by a year and a half, running roughly the midpoint of Governor Phil Murphy’s (D-NJ) second term. “This failure didn’t occur under my watch,” Sherrill said, “but accountability starts now.” Murphy’s office has not offered its own public account of how a software error inside a state agency he oversaw went undetected for a year.
The Justice Department isn’t interested in the politics of blame — it wants names. Trump-appointed Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent New Jersey a letter on July 21 giving the state five business days to produce the full, unredacted voter data. Dhillon said the fewer-than-400 people who actually voted are “subject to prosecution and removal from the United States.”
This is unacceptable and illegal! The @CivilRights Division @TheJusticeDept is investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes.
Sherrill refused. She has released the topline numbers but not the underlying list, and has accused the DOJ of trying to “weaponize” the disclosure for political ends. That refusal is now the subject of its own lawsuit, United States v. Caldwell, filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 against Secretary of State Dale Caldwell (D) — sworn in this January — over his refusal to turn over complete voter-roll records.
Sherrill’s version of events treats this as a software error — a glitch. IDEMIA, the French contractor that runs the MVC’s registration system, disputes that framing entirely. Lisa Shoemaker, an IDEMIA senior vice president, said publicly that the system correctly captured citizenship-status answers from applicants the whole time; the state, she said, simply failed to validate that data or act on it before automatically registering people to vote.
That is a materially different story than “software error.” A glitch implies the system produced the wrong answer. IDEMIA’s account says New Jersey had the right answer sitting in its own database and didn’t check it — for a year, across an unknown number of MVC office visits, before Sherrill’s administration caught it at all. Neither Sherrill’s office nor Murphy’s has directly rebutted IDEMIA’s account as of this writing.
New Jersey’s confirmed numbers didn’t stay confirmed for long once Washington got hold of them. Trump-appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Homeland Security’s own review found 35,152 “potential noncitizens” registered in New Jersey — more than five times Sherrill’s number.
Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen.
President Trump went further on Truth Social, citing the 35,152 figure directly and pushing for the SAVE America Act.
35,152 is the new number just released by Homeland Security of non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey. These are just the ones that got caught. The real numbers will prove to be many times this amount. They are all Dumocrats! Republicans, get smart and straighten out our Crooked Elections! Pass The Save America Act!!!
Fact-checkers at PolitiFact and Snopes have found the 35,152 figure — and the 278,000 Trump has cited nationally — unsupported; DHS's own language calls these lists 'preliminary,' and a comparable Florida list once shrank from roughly 180,000 names to 85 after vetting.
Not every Democrat is treating this as a crisis. Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) downplayed the scandal on MSNBC, saying “we’re looking at the problems in the right size, that this is not akin to what Donald Trump was talking about.” Vice President JD Vance (R) pushed back directly, pressing Kim and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on whether they would support the SAVE America Act now that New Jersey itself had confirmed noncitizens were on its rolls.
Vance presses Sens. Booker and Kim directly on whether they'll back the SAVE America Act, arguing New Jersey's own confirmed numbers are exactly the problem the bill is meant to catch.
Quoting Vance's fuller remarks pressing Booker and Kim on the SAVE America Act in light of New Jersey's noncitizen voter-roll disclosure.
New Jersey Republicans want the confirmed number treated seriously, not waved away. Senate Minority Leader Anthony Bucco (R), Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio (R), and Sens. Declan O’Scanlon (R), Kristin Corrado (R), and Joe Pennacchio (R), along with Assemblymembers Gregory McGuckin (R) and Al Barlas (R), are demanding investigations and prosecutions. “It happened, and it’s worse than anyone expected,” O’Scanlon said. NJ GOP State Chair Christine Giordano Hanlon (R), who is also Monmouth County Clerk, says records she obtained through the state’s open-records law suggest the problem predates and exceeds the window Sherrill disclosed: “The system and verification process must be improved in order to safeguard our elections.”
J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has tracked New Jersey noncitizen voting for years, said the state’s admission validates work critics have long dismissed. “This has been a problem for years,” Adams said. “It’s hard to deny it now.” PILF’s 2017 “Garden State Gotcha” report found 1,069 noncitizens on New Jersey rolls across 11 counties, 37% of whom had voted — a nine-year-old finding cited here only as precedent, not as evidence about this disclosure.
In December 2025, a Bergen County grand jury indicted Muhammad Muzammal, 37, and Muhammad Shakeel, 62, both of Maywood and both Pakistani nationals, for allegedly voting illegally in the 2020 federal election and lying about their citizenship on N-400 naturalization applications.
Both men are presumed innocent and neither charge is connected to the MVC software error Sherrill disclosed in July 2026 — this story does not fold their case into the 6,600/400 figures above.
DOJ’s five-business-day deadline, set to lapse around July 27–28, is bearing down with New Jersey still withholding the full list, setting up a protracted fight in United States v. Caldwell over how much of the underlying voter data the state must produce and to whom. That litigation sits inside a broader nationwide push: Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has opened noncitizen-voting inquiries in multiple states this year. New Jersey is now the most concrete example, with an actual number attached to it.
What’s left unresolved: whether any of the fewer-than-400 confirmed voters are actually charged, whether Hanlon’s OPRA records show a wider problem than Sherrill disclosed, and whether IDEMIA’s account of a state validation failure — rather than a vendor glitch — becomes the official version of events. None of that changes the one number every side now agrees on: 6,600 people who should not have been on New Jersey’s voter rolls were on them.
New Jersey itself confirms 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered to vote and fewer than 400 cast a ballot — a Motor Vehicle Commission failure that ran through the middle of Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D-NJ) second term and surfaced under Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ). Sherrill is refusing DOJ’s demand for the full unredacted list, and Secretary of State Dale Caldwell (D) is now a defendant in the federal suit over that refusal. Vendor IDEMIA says the real failure was New Jersey’s own, not a software glitch. Every number larger than New Jersey’s own — 35,152, 278,000 — remains disputed and fact-checked as unsupported.
