New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill thought she had found a tidy off-ramp from a serious political mess. Blame the software. Announce an investigation. Let the story fade.
The vendor she blamed had other ideas.
IDEMIA, the technology company Sherrill pointed to when explaining how 6,600 noncitizens ended up on New Jersey’s voter rolls, issued a statement flatly contradicting the “software error” narrative. The company said its role was simply to transmit information from the Motor Vehicle Commission to the state’s Division of Elections. Crucially, that information still had to be “validated and adjudicated” by Division of Elections staff before any registration was finalized. Translation: human beings at the state level reviewed applications from people who had already indicated they were not U.S. citizens, and registered them anyway.
This was not a rogue algorithm making quiet decisions in the background. This was a process failure involving actual state election officials.
As originally reported, the Department of Justice probe launched by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon arrived within hours of Sherrill’s announcement, before IDEMIA’s statement even became public. Now that the vendor has directly contradicted the governor’s framing, federal investigators have considerably more ground to cover. The central question has shifted from “what did the software do wrong?” to “who approved these registrations, and why did it take so long for anyone to notice?”
Then there is California.
IDEMIA holds a 12-year contract with California’s DMV, signed in 2022, covering all driver’s licenses and state identification cards beginning in late 2025. No confirmed identical error has emerged there yet. But the Trump administration has already flagged up to 190,000 potential noncitizen registrations in California, while the state’s Secretary of State continues insisting noncitizen voting is “exceedingly rare.” California has also refused to cooperate with federal voter roll review requests.
The logic here is uncomfortable but unavoidable. If New Jersey’s election officials were approving registrations from self-identified noncitizens for over a year without catching it, while using the same vendor California now relies on, then California’s own assurances that everything is fine simply are not enough. Independent verification is the only way to answer the question. California is actively blocking that verification.
DHS Secretary Mark Mullin put the broader picture in stark terms: 250,000 noncitizens identified across just four states reviewed so far, with 46 states still unexamined. Compliance with the SAVE America Act’s requirements will be tied to federal election funding going forward.
Sherrill framed the White House’s election integrity push as an attempt to “weaponize elections for political gain.” Democrats and allied voices have long argued that noncitizen voting is essentially a myth, too rare to matter and too difficult to pull off.
New Jersey just proved that argument wrong. The software company just confirmed it was not the software.
That leaves a lot of hard questions still waiting for honest answers, in Trenton and Sacramento alike.