Governor Mikie Sherrill thought she had a clean exit from New Jersey’s noncitizen voting disaster. Blame the software. Blame the previous administration. Announce an investigation. Move on.
The software company didn’t cooperate with that plan.
IDEMIA — the vendor Sherrill pointed at when explaining how 6,600 noncitizens ended up registered to vote in New Jersey — issued a statement Tuesday that blows apart the “software error” narrative entirely. The company’s role, it said, was strictly to transmit information from the Motor Vehicle Commission to the state’s Division of Elections. What IDEMIA transmitted had to be “validated and adjudicated” by the Division of Elections before anyone got registered. In other words: state election officials manually reviewed those 6,600 applications from people who had already indicated they were not U.S. citizens — and registered them anyway.
This was not a rogue algorithm. This was human beings at the New Jersey Division of Elections processing applications from self-identified noncitizens and putting them on the voter rolls.
That’s not a software glitch. That’s a scandal.
The DOJ probe launched by Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon landed within hours of Sherrill’s Tuesday announcement — before the IDEMIA statement even surfaced. Now that the software company has publicly contradicted the governor’s framing, the investigators have considerably more to work with. The question is no longer just “how did the software fail?” It’s “who approved these registrations, and why?”
And then there’s California.
The same IDEMIA company has a 12-year contract with California’s DMV — a contract signed in 2022, covering all driver’s licenses and identification cards statewide beginning in late 2025. No identical error has been confirmed in California. But the Trump administration has already flagged up to 190,000 potential noncitizen registrations in the state, and California’s Secretary of State is still insisting noncitizen voting is “exceedingly rare” while the state simultaneously refuses to cooperate with federal voter roll review requests.
Here is the logical conclusion every honest observer has to reach: if New Jersey’s state election officials were approving voter registrations for people who self-identified as noncitizens without catching it for over a year — while using the same vendor California now uses — the question of whether California has an identical or similar problem cannot be answered by California’s own insistence that everything is fine. It can only be answered by the kind of independent federal verification that California is actively blocking.
DHS Secretary Mark Mullin made the stakes clear: 250,000 noncitizens identified across just four states reviewed so far. Forty-six states haven’t been reviewed yet. Compliance with the SAVE America Act’s requirements will be mandatory for states that want federal election funding.
Sherrill called Trump’s election integrity focus an attempt to “weaponize elections for political gain.” The White House’s response was on point: Democrats and their allies have repeatedly insisted noncitizen voting is impossible. New Jersey just proved it isn’t. The software company just confirmed it wasn’t the software.
Time to come clean — in Trenton and Sacramento both.
