New Jersey Refuses to Cooperate with DOJ Investigation into Noncitizen Voting

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill spurned the Department of Justice’s request for information on the nearly 6,600 noncitizens who were improperly added to the state’s voter rolls, raising the ire of Trump administration officials who are making election security a priority heading in the November midterms.

Read more Nebraska Senate Candidate Dan Osborn Accepts Corporate Money Despite Loud Opposition

The move follows Sherrill’s announcement on Tuesday that thousands of noncitizens had been added to New Jersey voter rolls, with 400 individuals casting ballots. Later that day, the DOJ requested the names, addresses, nationalities, and registration locations of the 6,600 non-citizens who were marked as voters, even though they identified themselves as noncitizens. Noncitizens convicted of voting in U.S. elections can face criminal penalties including deportation.

“Ensuring that U.S. citizen’s votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizen’s votes is of paramount importance,” the letter from the DOJ stated.

Sherrill voiced concerns that the information would be misused by the DOJ.

“We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it,” Sherrill said at an event on Thursday.

The DOJ gave Sherill five days to turn over the information and entered the letter sent to state officials as an exhibit in the agency’s ongoing lawsuit seeking access to the state’s electronic voter registration database.

Sherrill’s office could not be contacted for an additional statement.

State officials claim the error was due to a software glitch in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission. The governor blamed the software vendor, IDEMIA, revealing that the state had already planned to end its contract before the issue was discovered.

Sherrill pointed to IDEMIA’s “bureaucracy” and “red tape” as causing problems, though she also acknowledged the disorder of her state’s Motor Vehicle Commission.

Read more How Cuba Is Covertly Boosting America’s Radical Left

IDEMIA’s senior vice president of global corporate relations Lisa Shoemaker fired back, revealing that error had only stopped once the MVC requested that noncitizens who indicated ‘Yes’ to wanting to register to vote not be labeled as voters in June of 2024. Shoemaker alleged that the error was due to the state’s mishandling of data, not a flaw in the software itself.

After Sherrill announced the error, many Republicans seized upon the event to advocate passage of the SAVE Act.

In a post to Truth Social, Trump called the scandal “another reason” to pass the SAVE Act, which would institute stricter requirements for voter identification laws.

Currently, the legislation has stalled in the Senate. Congressional Republicans have suggested that the bill could be tacked on to a bipartisan spending bill, which would bypass the Senate filibuster and the 60-vote threshold.

For New Jersey Republican Party chair Christine Giordano Hanlon, the revelation was cathartic.

“We in the New Jersey GOP did an election integrity task force a few months ago. We were called fearmongers, conspiracy theorists. And one of our biggest findings was that there were many noncitizens on the New Jersey voter rolls,” Hanlon said in a statement to NJ Spotlight News.

Read more European Heat Wave Driven by Cleaner Air, U.K. Climate Office Study Finds