New Jersey DMV error wrongly registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote

Gov. Mikie Sherrill said a 2023 software error at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission improperly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote, exposing a breakdown in the state’s election-administration pipeline rather than a coordinated fraud scheme. A preliminary review found fewer than 400 of those improperly registered people actually cast ballots in 2023 and 2024, but the mistake still sent shock waves through Trenton and beyond.

The error centered on the state’s motor-vehicle registration system, where eligible residents can register to vote during MVC transactions and the agency reports that information to the New Jersey Division of Elections. That link is designed to make registration easier and more complete, but it also means a software or data-transfer failure at the MVC can move bad information directly onto the voter rolls before election officials catch it.

Sherrill said the faulty registrations happened in 2023 and 2024, covering a period long enough to affect multiple election cycles and multiple batches of registrations. The figures point to a systems failure at the front end of the process, where records should have been screened before they were forwarded into the state’s voter-registration machinery.

The political fallout was immediate. Republicans called for an investigation into how the error happened and how it could have persisted long enough to affect thousands of records. Sherrill said fixes to the motor vehicle registration glitches were underway, and she said she would not be surprised if the Trump administration pursued prosecutions over the roughly 400 noncitizens who voted.

The episode has sharpened scrutiny of the state’s cross-checks, audit trails and agency handoffs. New Jersey’s voter-registration setup relies on the MVC to transmit information correctly to election officials, so the failure raises a broader question that goes beyond one software bug: whether the safeguards between motor-vehicle records and the voter rolls are strong enough to catch mismatches before they become registered voters.

New Jersey is also a high-profile case for automatic voter registration. The Institute for Responsive Government said the state became the 11th to enact secure automatic voter registration, a system built to expand access while preserving eligibility checks. In this case, the machinery meant to improve participation appears to have done the opposite, letting ineligible registrations slip through before the error was recognized and corrected.