New Jersey’s noncitizen voter blame game doesn’t add up — literally

Somewhere between Trenton and Washington, New Jersey’s noncitizen voter count has become the political equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat — both 6,600 and 35,152, both an accident and a scandal — until someone finally opens the box.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) claimed Tuesday that roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens had been mistakenly added to the state’s voter rolls and that fewer than 400 of them went on to cast ballots between June 2023 and June 2024.

‘These are just the ones that got caught.’

According to Sherrill’s own account, people were asked directly, on a keypad, whether they were U.S. citizens, and they answered “no.” The system registered them to vote anyway.

Sherrill blamed a “serious software error” in the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission system for this failure. Sherrill claimed the “error” dates back to the administration of her predecessor, Phil Murphy (D).

Since she learned of the problem last week, Sherrill has launched an investigation, has ordered the erroneous registrations to be removed, and is replacing the vendor that ran the system.

The Department of Justice said it is looking into the matter as well.

RELATED: Trump exposed the cracks in our elections. The media proved his point.

Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images

IDEMIA, the French multinational company that has supported New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission “for more than 40 years,” pushed back on the state’s framing. The company said its role is limited to transmitting registration data, noting that the information IDEMIA submits “must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.”

The 6,600 number is notably smaller than the 35,152 noncitizens the Department of Homeland Security flagged on New Jersey’s voter rolls last Friday, a figure President Trump cited last week in a speech on election integrity, along with the claim that 250,000 noncitizens are registered across New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania combined.

Sherrill has yet to reconcile the gap between the DHS’ number and her own and has accused Trump of trying to “weaponize elections for political gain.” In her statement, she added, “Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.”

Trump himself put the 35,152 figure front and center in a post on Truth Social, calling it the “new” DHS number of noncitizens registered to vote in New Jersey and insisting “these are just the ones that got caught” and that “real numbers will prove to be many times this amount.”

He argued that all of those registrants are Democrats, urged Republicans to “get smart,” and called for passage of the SAVE America Act to overhaul election rules.

On CNN’s “The Lead,” Jake Tapper said in response to the whole debacle that the revelation is “not good for Democrats’ argument that there’s no such thing as undocumented immigrants voting.”

Older Tapper remarks resurfaced in which he had dismissed election-security concerns, saying, “It happens, but at very, very miniscule numbers. It’s not a serious threat when it comes to election security.”

Sherrill says the 400 improper voters were “registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state” — though those figures, like the 6,600 number itself, come from her own account.

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