The chair of the New Jersey Republican Party is alleging that the number of non-citizens improperly placed on the state’s voter rolls from 2023 to 2024 is far higher than the 6,600 disclosed last week by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill.
Speaking Sunday, GOP Chairwoman Christine Hanlon said she believes Sherrill’s reported total represents only an early glimpse of what Republicans are calling a widening voter registration controversy.
“They’re indicating it’s over 6,000, but I know it’s more than that,” Hanlon said during an appearance on 77 WABC’s “Cats Roundtable.”
“So it’s more to come,” she told host John Catsimatidis.
Sherrill acknowledged last week that more than 6,000 non-citizens had been mistakenly added to New Jersey’s voter registration system, with about 400 of them allegedly casting ballots unlawfully in state elections between June 2023 and June 2024.
The improper registrations took place during the administration of Sherrill’s predecessor, former Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, and were tied to the New Jersey Commission on Motor Vehicles’ automatic voter registration process for residents applying for identification.
“Wow. This is something we’ve been talking about for a long time,” Hanlon said Sunday, pointing to the voter roll error as a serious failure.
“They admitted non-citizens were on the voting rolls.”
The Justice Department has launched a probe into the troubling situation, while state officials and a software vendor blame each other for the scandal. Sherrill’s team has tapped an independent firm, CSG Law, to investigate the fiasco as well.
Sherrill claimed a “serious software error” in the state’s Motor Vehicle System involving French tech company IDEMIA caused the mishap.
But IDEMIA said the state had access to data showing that those individuals were not citizens — and apparently registered them to vote anyway.
The practice of registering people to vote at DMVs is employed in dozens of other states.
“Elections come down to a small number of votes. This type of issue cannot be dismissed or pushed aside,” Hanlon said.
New Jersey has had more than a dozen elections with margins of 10 votes or fewer in the past decade, according to Ballotpedia.
“Full investigations need to happen, and policy changes need to happen,” Hanlon said. “The governor of New Jersey is trying to say, ‘It’s this one glitch, one tiny thing. A software glitch during a short time that allowed this to happen.’ I know that’s not the whole story.
“We are pushing to expose the rest of the story and really push for policy changes,” she said. “It is bad policies that lead to these election-integrity issues.
“It’s the main focus for me. It’s the main focus for the RNC [Republican National Committee], and for so many of our Republicans across our state and across the country. We need election integrity.”
Revelations about the voter-roll disaster in the Garden State come as Republicans in Congress are pushing for more robust election integrity measures at the behest of President Trump.
In a recent prime-time address to the nation, Trump claimed that nearly 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Nevada, with up to 35,152 wrongly enrolled in the Garden State.
Last week, the Republican-led House attached a voter-ID requirement to legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The bill passed with full support from Republicans, but all but 13 Democrats opposed it. House Democrats argued the measure requiring photo identification to cast a ballot was a poison pill to suppress voting rights.
Trump has pushed for passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote, but has run into a dead end in the Senate, though Republicans are currently working to pass a watered-down version of it.
The SAVE America Act has been Trump’s top legislative priority of 2026.
