A woman marks her ballot inside of a voting center during early voting in the states' presidential primary election, Tuesday, March 26, 2024, in Freeport, N.Y. In Long Island's Nassau County, a handful of Latino residents and a local civil rights organization allege that a redistricting map drawn by the county Legislature dilutes the voting power of Black, Latino and Asian residents. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)
A software error caused more than 6,000 noncitizens to be added to New Jersey’s voter rolls, the state’s Democratic governor said Tuesday, while fewer than 400 of them were found to have illegally cast ballots.
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Gov. Mikie Sherrill blamed a software vendor called IDEMIA for the issue, saying the software erroneously registered the noncitizens to vote while they were applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards through New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System. State officials said they would begin working with a new vendor.
“These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen … but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway,” Sherill said in a statement.
IDEMIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Sherrill’s announcement comes less than a week after President Donald Trump railed against voter fraud and election interference in a prime-time speech to the country. During the fiery White House address, he asserted that the Department of Homeland Security had evidence that more than 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in the country. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin backed up the claim in a press conference the next day without providing further evidence.
Noncitizen voting is extremely rare, election officials say, and there is no evidence that it has occurred on a mass scale that could change the outcome of an election.
Sherrill acknowledged on Tuesday that Trump would likely use the news as evidence of widespread vulnerabilities in the country’s election security system, despite little evidence to support the claim.
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“Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” Sherrill said. “For the past 10 years, he’s cried wolf and peddled bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence.”
Sherrill said she launched an investigation immediately after learning about the error on July 15 — the day before Trump’s speech.
A majority of the 400 voters were registered as unaffiliated, as well as a few Democrats and Republicans, Sherrill said. The voters were scattered across the state, she added.
Sherrill said her administration does not have any evidence at this point that the erroneous votes swayed any election. An investigation into those votes remains ongoing.
“This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now, because the people of New Jersey shouldn’t have to wait a year for a problem to get solved, or two years to learn it even happened, I’m taking immediate action to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again,” Sherrill said.
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