Republicans wasted no time in going after Democrats when news broke that 6,600 noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote in New Jersey, casting the incident as evidence of rampant election fraud.
But Democrats, led by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, are leaning hard into transparency on the issue — especially as the party has little ground available to lose in the midst of President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to tighten elections laws and claim more control from the states.
“It is the right thing to do — to be clear with the public about anything you find and to build trust in a system that generally works really well,” said Ben Olinsky, a senior fellow at the Democratic think tank Center for American Progress. “That is also the right strategy for dealing with someone who has repeatedly and habitually lied about elections in the form of Donald Trump.”
The erroneous registrations were caused by a software error, Sherrill said Tuesday — an explanation that IDEMIA, the France-based company in charge of transmitting information through New Jersey’s motor vehicle system, has denied. Former Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy also denies having any knowledge of the incident after Sherill said the mistakes occurred under her predecessor.
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But during that news conference, Sherrill momentarily pivoted to the president: “Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.”
“The difference between my administration and this White House is stark,” the governor said on Tuesday. “We don’t deflect, deny or exploit problems for our own gain. We find them, and we fix them, because that’s what a good, accountable government should do.”
Sherrill’s rebuke appeared to be an attempt to deter Trump and Republicans from using the incident as evidence for widely debunked assertions of mass voter fraud as the party pushes Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, the president’s signature “election integrity” bill.
Trump had already jumped on the issue, exaggerating at a Wednesday rally that “thousands and thousands” of votes had been illegally cast in the state after the software glitch. A preliminary review found that fewer than 400 people out of the 6,600 accidentally registered went on to illegally vote, Sherrill said.
The White House claimed credit for the situation going public at all: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Sherrill’s initial announcement was prompted by a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, but the governor previously said she learned about the incident and launched an investigation days before she was contacted by DHS.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey) and 18 other House Republicans sent a letter to Sherrill on Friday, stating that conservatives’ concerns about election integrity over the past few years had “too often” been dismissed as “exaggerated or unfounded.” The letter said the incident showed that “these vulnerabilities are real.”
“The fact that this happened — with or without software playing a role — can neither be ignored by Congress nor dismissed as a simple, garden-variety computer glitch,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) posted on X. “We need the SAVE America Act to stop this from happening.”
The rhetorical tug-of-war demonstrates how an anomaly can be equipped to bolster baseless claims, Democratic lawmakers say. The way to combat attacks on election integrity, lawmakers and experts said, is to swiftly inform the public and take responsibility.
“That’s the kind of transparency we need,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey) told NOTUS. “We need to make sure it’s fixed, and someone needs to be held accountable for the fact that this wasn’t all squared away as soon as possible.”
Multiple lawmakers said the issue hasn’t swayed their confidence in New Jersey’s — or the country’s — ability to conduct accurate elections. Election officials being honest about “isolated problems” strengthens trust in the broader election system because it “demonstrates that safeguards are working,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“There are those who will choose to weaponize this issue in an attempt to undermine confidence in our elections — we cannot allow that,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) said in a statement.
Any concern about voting integrity from Trump and right-wing Republicans is a pretext for further federal overreach in states running their own elections, California Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Rules and Administration Committee, said in a statement.
Noncitizen voting is a rare occurrence, and no evidence has been uncovered that shows it changed the outcome of an election, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. Becker said “no one credible” is denying that noncitizen voting has never happened.
Election law experts, he said, are quantifying the incidents and contextualizing them “in relationship to the voter lists and the actual votes cast.” Becker said the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, would not have changed the situation in New Jersey because that information was accurately collected. The individuals marked that they were not citizens but were added to voter rolls anyway.
“It’s 400 voters in the state of New Jersey after a glitch. If you don’t have the glitch, that number is much smaller. This is a tiny blip,” Becker said Thursday. “They’re trying to use a nuclear bomb to kill an ant.”
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