House GOP Subpoenas New Jersey Over 6,600 Noncitizens Registered to Vote After the State Turned Over Just 12 Documents

About 6,600 people walked into New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission between June 2023 and June 2024, told the state on a PIN pad that they were not U.S. citizens, and were registered to vote anyway. About 340 of them went on to cast ballots. On Wednesday, House Republicans subpoenaed the state for the records that explain how it happened, because after 79 days of asking, New Jersey had handed over just 12 documents.

The subpoena went to Shirley Emehelu, the acting secretary of state who runs New Jersey's elections under Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill. It was signed by Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, who chairs the House Administration Committee; Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who chairs the Judiciary Committee; Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida, who chairs the elections subcommittee; and Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who chairs the Judiciary oversight subcommittee. New Jersey has until Nov. 16 to comply, according to the committees' letter.

"We have given Governor Sherrill's administration every opportunity to provide answers, and they have failed to do so," Van Drew said, the New Jersey Monitor reported. "Thousands of people told the state they were not American citizens, yet they were registered to vote anyway. Hundreds actually voted. The state knew about this failure in 2024, and somehow these registrations remained on the rolls for nearly two years."

Twelve documents in 79 days

Congress first asked for the records on Aug. 3. The committees' letter lays out what came back, and it reads like a homework assignment turned in with the name and date filled out and nothing else.

The first batch, on Aug. 28, held four documents, two of them already public. The second, two weeks later, held five: two electronic meeting invites "with no substantive information," an email to county election officials summarizing the problem, and a one-paragraph memo from Sherrill dated Aug. 4 ordering the cleanup of an issue "which had already been disclosed to the press." A third batch was three emails from the software vendor about the contracting process.

None of it answered the two questions Congress keeps asking: how the noncitizen registrations were discovered, and why nobody pulled them off the rolls until 2026. On calls in September and October, the state's lawyers cited attorney-client, work product, executive and deliberative process privileges, but never said which documents those covered or how many there were. "Without additional details, it strains credulity to believe that every document responsive to the Committees' request that has not been produced is privileged or that the privileges are being appropriately invoked," the letter says. The state also "declined to provide to a timeline for any future productions."

A 'glitch' the vendor says wasn't a glitch

Sherrill disclosed the problem on July 21 and blamed a "serious software error" by IDEMIA, the company behind the MVC's voter registration system. IDEMIA says that's not what happened. "All 6,600 individuals indicated 'Yes' to wanting to register to vote and 'No' to being a US Citizen," the company said, adding that the information "was recorded correctly and always available to the MVC," as quoted in an Aug. 11 House letter. According to IDEMIA, the registrations only stopped in June 2024, when the MVC asked it to change certain settings, and still nobody removed the names.

In other words, the state's own database showed thousands of people saying "I'm not a citizen" right next to "register me," and the state kept them on the voter rolls for two more years. It's like a bank noticing a cash drawer was short, quietly fixing the lock, and never counting what went missing.

That's why Van Drew isn't buying the word "glitch" on faith. "If it was simply a software glitch, then show us the evidence," he said. "Who knew about it? Why wasn't it fixed sooner? And what about people who may have falsely claimed to be citizens and were never independently verified?"

That last question matters most. The 6,600 are only the people who told the truth on the PIN pad. Nobody yet knows how many noncitizens simply pressed "yes."

What the state has done since

By Aug. 19, the state said, about 5,100 of the registrations had been deleted outright and about 1,450 more were switched to "rejected" and sent to county officials for review, according to Sherrill's office. Roughly 220 more people affected by the error who voted, but who also had other registrations on file, were referred to the counties too. The state has dropped IDEMIA, and an October review turned up about 750 more bad records from the same system and about 340 "potentially improper" registrations from MVC re-entry events going back to 2016.

Van Drew has said he doesn't blame Sherrill for a failure that started under her predecessor, Democrat Phil Murphy. "But she is responsible for providing answers now," he said. "Instead of getting answers, we got political attacks and a handful of documents that explain next to nothing."

Sherrill's response proved his point. She called the subpoena "political theater" and said Republicans are "choosing to play political games just thirteen days before the midterm elections." Her statement did not say when the records would arrive.

What's next

The clock is the problem. Mail-in voting for the Nov. 3 election is already underway in New Jersey, and early in-person voting starts Saturday. The state's deadline to turn over the records is Nov. 16, nearly two weeks after the polls close. Emehelu took over the job only a month ago, after Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, who also served as secretary of state, resigned in September under pressure from Sherrill and fellow Democrats amid an ethics investigation.

Congress isn't asking for much. It wants to know who knew, when they knew it, and why thousands of people who said they weren't citizens stayed eligible to vote for two years. If the answer really is an innocent software bug, New Jersey should be eager to prove it.