New Jersey’s ‘Software Error’ That Registered 6,600 Noncitizens Is No Accident

New Jersey’s discovery was the predictable outgrowth of a political culture that treats elections as a mere census exercise.

The political earthquake from the revelation of New Jersey’s tainted voter lists — with some 6,600 noncitizens registered to vote — have produced another aftershock: Gov. Mikie Sherrill announcing support for some form of voter ID. A chorus of left-wing groups immediately cried foul. And, it’s unlikely that Democrats in the general assembly, who hold a supermajority, would ever pass a voter ID bill. The upshot being that Gov. Sherrill’s comments are merely designed to turn the temperature down on the noncitizen voter scandal.

It was only three weeks ago that Gov. Sherrill blamed a “serious software error” at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission for improperly registering thousands of noncitizens to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. About 400 of them cast ballots. The affected individuals had answered “no” when asked if they were U.S. citizens while applying for driver’s licenses or IDs. Yet the system enrolled them anyway.

Sherrill, a Democrat who took office after the period in question, blamed the vendor and her predecessor’s administration. She ordered the names removed, promised an investigation, and fretted that these noncitizens might face federal consequences “through no fault of their own.”

But the software company, IDEMIA, pushed back hard: There was no glitch. The system recorded the “no” answers correctly and transmitted the data as the state had designed the process. Officials had citizenship information available the entire time.

This was not a mere coding mishap. It was the predictable outgrowth of a political culture that treats elections not as the exclusive right of citizens but rather as a mere census exercise — a headcount of certain groups who are expected to owe allegiance to the left.

In a recent Texas Public Policy Foundation study, “How to Ensure That Only Citizens Vote,” I examined precisely this danger.

Privilege of Citizenship

The right to vote is not a universal human entitlement that magically attaches to anyone present on American soil. It is a sovereign privilege of citizenship. Noncitizen voting dilutes the votes of actual Americans and erodes public confidence in elections, which Gallup data shows has fallen from 72 percent in 2004 to 57 percent in 2024. Nine in 10 Americans say stopping noncitizen voting is important. Yet the left continues to resist the simplest safeguards: documentary proof of citizenship and voter ID.

History suggests this problem is neither new nor unique. Consider Tammany Hall. What began as a social club became New York’s dominant political machine under Aaron Burr and his successors. When property qualifications still limited the franchise, Tammany loaned money to poor farmers, mechanics, and transients so they could meet the requirement and tip elections — most famously helping flip New York for Thomas Jefferson in 1800. After New York’s 1821 constitution effectively abolished those property rules, the machine adapted. Facing a flood of Irish immigration after the Potato Famine, Tammany abandoned its earlier nativism, stood up naturalization bureaus, supplied witnesses, leaned on judges, and expedited citizenship papers for the Irish, along with French and German arrivals. Ward bosses then traded jobs, housing, and emergency aid for reliable Democratic votes. By 1855, Irish immigrants made up roughly one-third of New York City’s electorate. Tammany controlled the mayor’s office, city patronage, and often state politics.

The lesson is not that immigrants are the problem. The lesson is that ambitious political organizations will exploit every available lever — legal or otherwise — to turn bodies into ballots when the system looks the other way.

Political power is a powerful motivator. From the earliest days of the republic through Tammany to the present, some have viewed people not as sovereign individuals capable of enlightened self-interest, but as means to an end.

Progressives’ View of Elections

Today’s progressive view of elections as a census exercise is the modern equivalent. In this framework, the goal is not to ensure only citizens decide the direction of the republic. It is to expand the electorate, lower barriers, and treat every warm body as a vote. San Francisco already allows noncitizens to vote in school board elections. California and other blue states rely on self-attestation of citizenship under the National Voter Registration Act, aggressive mail-ballot harvesting, and minimal verification. Democrats have repeatedly pushed federal legislation such as the For the People Act that would ban meaningful ID and citizenship checks. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would further amplify the problem by letting states with the weakest election security effectively decide presidential outcomes for everyone else.

The New Jersey episode illuminates the pattern. Automatic voter registration at motor vehicle offices is designed for volume, not verification. When the software (or the process the state approved) ignored clear “no” answers on citizenship, the system did exactly what a census-style approach rewards: it maximized the rolls. That roughly 400 noncitizens — that we know of — then voted is not a statistical footnote. In close, often low-turnout local races, a few hundred illegal ballots can decide outcomes. Heritage Foundation data already documents more than 1,500 proven election fraud cases nationwide, including noncitizen voting. Arizona jury-duty data and Texas’s SAVE database checks have flagged thousands more suspected noncitizens on the rolls.

Yet left-wing litigation routinely blocks or slows removal.

Proper Response

The proper response is straightforward and constitutional. States retain primary authority over voter qualifications for state and local elections. Arizona’s bifurcated system offers a workable model: require documentary proof of citizenship — birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers — for a full ballot that includes state and local races, while allowing a federal-only ballot for those who register solely under the federal form. Texas and other serious states should adopt and expand this approach, create verified-voter lists, cross-check against Social Security and immigration databases, and conduct precinct-based voting for federal-only registrants to minimize error.

Ideally, Congress would pass the SAVE Act requiring proof of citizenship for federal voter registration.

None of this is “voter suppression.” It is the minimum required to protect the equal weight of every citizen’s vote. The alternative — continuing to treat elections as a headcount open to whoever happens to be present or who is “helped” to cast a ballot by mail — invites exactly the Tammany-style opportunism we saw in 19^th-century New York — and what may be the tip of the iceberg that was just exposed in New Jersey.