NJ agency will conduct daily audits to prevent more voter registration errors, governor says

The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission will automatically check new voter registrations against customers’ responses before transmitting them to election officials in a bid to prevent erroneous registrations, Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced Wednesday.

The new procedures come more than two months after Sherrill announced roughly 6,600 people who marked themselves as noncitizens were registered to vote during visits to the Motor Vehicle Commission as a result of what the administration said was a technical glitch.

“Our investigation is ongoing, we will follow the facts wherever they lead, fix the problems we inherited, do it the right way, and hold those responsible accountable,” Sherrill, a Democrat, said in a statement Wednesday.

The voter registration gaffe elicited criticism from Republican officials here in New Jersey and nationwide who said it verified their claims of widespread voter fraud. Sherrill said about 340 noncitizens ended up casting ballots, and has noted that the problem arose before she became governor in January.

The new daily audit system Sherrill announced Wednesday will compare customers’ responses to newly created voter registration records to ensure the information is accurate and the voter is eligible.

The automated system, which is in the process of implementation, will flag incomplete or contradictory records for manual review. Under the plan, corrected records can only be released once commission staff confirms they match customers’ responses.

The governor said the ongoing review uncovered other registrations affected by a software error caused by Idemia, the vendor that oversaw the commission’s licensing systems, that registered some voters who marked themselves as too young to be eligible. Idemia has said it was not responsible for the erroneous registrations.

About 750 residents were registered after saying they were not eligible to vote because of their age, though all of them entered birth dates that would have made each of them at least 18 years old at the time, Sherrill said.

“No underage person voted as a result of this error,” Sherrill said. “They appear to have pressed the wrong button on the PIN pad by mistake.”

Still, many of those registrations may not be valid. The administration deleted about 380 registrations of voters who cast no ballots and were entered as a result of the age error. It sent another roughly 320 nonvoting registrants for county review.

About 50 people who registered after marking themselves age-ineligible subsequently cast ballots. Those registrations were deleted and forwarded to counties for review.

The review separately found about 340 individuals who were improperly registered at Motor Vehicle Commission prisoner reentry events dating as far back as 2016. Another 60 falsely attested to eligibility while imprisoned for a felony conviction. Their registrations were sent to counties for remediation.

“I said we were going to run a secure and fair election here in New Jersey and I meant it.  In just two and a half months, we conducted this review and are taking sweeping action to secure our voter registration processes and the integrity of our voter rolls, so that New Jerseyans can feel confident about their election system,” Sherrill said.

Sen. Anthony Bucco, the state Senate’s GOP leader, said Sherrill’s updates on the voter registration debacle create more questions than answers. The public should see a full report about the thousands of people improperly registered and the analysis that supports Sherrill’s conclusions, Bucco said.

“We now have even more evidence that there were serious weaknesses in New Jersey’s voter registration system but still do not understand the full story. It is past time to release that report and give the public the facts. We need to stop learning about new problems through piecemeal press releases and start getting real answers, with a legislative review that leaves no stone unturned and ensures New Jersey voters can have confidence in the integrity of their elections,” he said.