Feud escalates between NJ governor, GOP over voter registration gaffe

The war of words between Gov. Mikie Sherrill and congressional Republicans escalated Monday when Rep. Jeff Van Drew accused Sherrill of personally attacking him and his colleagues for investigating the state’s voter registration debacle.

Van Drew, a Republican seeking reelection in November, called a letter Sherrill sent him and a group of House Republicans on Friday a “political hit piece” that was beneath her office. He and Sherrill have been trading barbs over last month’s revelation that state officials registered thousands of noncitizens to vote.

“This was never about Governor Sherrill or any one political party. It is about New Jersey and the integrity of our country’s elections. Our mutual constituents deserve fair and secure elections, and they deserve the truth about how something this serious was allowed to happen,” Van Drew said in a statement from his office.

Republicans have used the voter registration blunder, which Sherrill has said was the result of a software error at the state Motor Vehicle Commission that started in 2023 and was caught in 2024, to criticize Democratic policies like automatic voter registration and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. Van Drew and 18 of his colleagues wrote a letter to Sherrill on July 24 demanding she answer a host of questions about the matter by Aug. 21.

Sherrill’s response, which came Friday, blasted Republicans in Congress as seeming “much more concerned with using the issue for political gain than they are with protecting our elections.”

“Seven of you attempted to overturn the 2020 elections and voted to challenge the electoral votes of states,” she wrote. “And notably, one of the signatories to your letter employed an operative convicted of voter fraud, bribery and blackmail.”

That last sentence is a reference to Craig Callaway, a former Atlantic City council president and Democratic operative who pleaded guilty in federal court last year to a 2022 mail ballot fraud scheme. In 2022, Callaway was working for Van Drew’s reelection campaign. Van Drew has denied any knowledge of the scheme.

Politico New Jersey reported last week that an attorney representing Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, who as secretary of state oversees state elections, told Van Drew and other House Republicans that the state would cooperate with their probe by sending them certain documents related to the voter registration gaffe starting this week. Sherrill had previously said the state would not release “personally identifying information” of the voters involved to the federal government because the Trump administration would “weaponize it against people.”

It’s unclear what documents Caldwell intends to share. Sherrill indicated to the New Jersey Monitor after an unrelated press conference last week that the state will share public documents with the Trump administration.

“We have seen again and again and again the Trump administration going on a fishing expedition here in New Jersey, and so they’ve attempted on numerous occasions to get all access to our voter rolls, the private information on those voter rolls. They provided no reason why they need that,” she said.

A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit the Trump administration filed against Caldwell seeking private data of all New Jersey voters.

Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, said Republicans “do deserve some credit for raising this issue all along,” pointing to state Sen. Kristin Corrado (R-Passaic), who had criticized automatic voter registration at motor vehicle locations long before Sherrill’s revelation about noncitizens voting. But he pushed back on Van Drew’s framing that the scrutiny of Sherrill isn’t political, noting that GOP-led states like Iowa and Florida have also found noncitizens on their voter rolls.

“There are definitely politics that are being played on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “I feel largely that the Republicans are handling this with a partisan advantage. I also think that Democrats are responding with politics of their own, and Gov. Sherrill is taking a good faith approach at trying to fix this.”

Sherrill said last week that state officials have deleted 5,100 registered voters from state voter rolls and have asked county election officials to review another 1,650 names. She said that roughly 340 of the 6,600 erroneously registered voters cast ballots.