NJ Gov: That Funny Thing That Never Happens Happened Again at the DMV, 6600 Times

Old and busted: There’s no such thing as widespread voter fraud! New hotness: “Hold my beer,” said New Jersey’s DMV. 

With Donald Trump pushing hard to have Congress pass the SAVE America Act and its package of electoral reforms, the Protection Racket Media has worked overtime to paint illegal voting as mainly a conservative fever dream. We are constantly told that voter fraud and non-citizen voting are rare to the point of non-existence. The necessities of voter-ID checks at the ballot box and demonstration of citizenship at registration are completely unnecessary, the media and Democrats insist. 

Except when state motor vehicle departments get involved, apparently, such as in the Garden State. Governor Mikie Sherrill had to make an embarrassing announcement at the same time her fellow Democrats are sneering at Trump’s push to bolster election security:

N.J. GOV. MIKIE SHERRILL

“Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking… pic.twitter.com/uRFpIRzVqm

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 21, 2026

… almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.

Well, oopsie! Who could have seen that coming? Practically everyone who opposed the Motor Voter Act that Bill Clinton pushed in the 1990s, as well as every automatic-registration scheme that has come down the pike since. 

As for “no fault of their own,” that may be true of the registration. However, as Sherrill had to admit, hundreds of these non-citizens chose to use these registrations to cast illegal ballots in elections:

The error took place when non-Americans applied for driver’s licenses or identification cards and answered “no” to the question of whether they were citizens, but were automatically registered anyway.

Sherrill noted that while most of the recipients did not cast ballots illegally, approximately 400 did.

“Through no fault of their own,” surely. The ballots just spontaneously burst into being, fully complete, and submitted themselves via osmosis and into elections. Sherrill’s statement is a masterpiece of passive-voice avoidance of the point, which is that automatic registration schemes like these can be easily manipulated to create fraud, and fraud at scale. This didn’t result in just a few illegal ballots being cast, but hundreds of them, while setting up thousands more for future elections. 

More to the point: this is only catching those who honestly answered “no” in the first place to the citizenship question. Imagine how many people may have lied and answered “yes” in order to complete an illegal voter registration. These motor-voter systems have no checks on these processes to catch people who fraudulently register to vote; they are designed to exclude citizenship verification. That is one change the SAVE America Act would make, and it clearly shows the necessity of the reform. 

Sherrill attempted to pre-empt the obvious by claiming that no one can prove these fraudulent ballots changed the results of an election:

Sherrill said that her office has hired an independent firm to investigate the snafu, which lends credence to President Trump’s warnings that states aren’t doing enough to stop voter fraud.

“We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” said Sherrill, who bristled at the possibility of Trump using New Jersey as an example of vulnerable elections.

There’s no evidence that elections weren’t swayed, either. That’s because the current systems are set up to prevent evidence of fraud from emerging at all. The White House wants the Senate to pass their package of election reforms, which would include more checks against fraud and limiting the use of voting procedures with more potential points of failure, to address the gaps in measures of election security. 

Sherrill is “bristling” because this failure shows exactly why conservatives fought against Clinton’s Motor Voter Act and why Trump and conservatives want much tighter controls on federal elections in the future. Let’s hope this lesson is not lost on those Senate Republicans who are less concerned about election integrity than they are in posing for the Protection Racket Media. 

Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote.

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