By Matt Rooney
For years, New Jersey’s political class dismissed election integrity concerns as paranoid fantasy. They insisted every safeguard was in place. Anyone who questioned automatic voter registration, driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, or Trenton’s obsession with automating elections was branded a conspiracy theorist.
This week, reality finally caught up.
Governor Mikie Sherrill admitted on Tuesday that approximately 6,600 people who identified themselves as non-citizens nevertheless wound up registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. Nearly 400 cast ballots.
The governor calls it a software glitch.
That’s convenient.
Software may have failed (the company is pushing back, for what it’s worth), but software merely executed the system politicians deliberately built. This wasn’t simply a computer bug. It was the predictable consequence of a policy architecture that prioritized making registration effortless over ensuring only eligible citizens were added to the rolls.
Call it what it was: fraud by design. Trenton knowingly designed a system that stripped away safeguards and made foreseeable abuse or error virtually inevitable.
The foundation was laid in 2018, when Democrats enacted automatic voter registration through the Motor Vehicle Commission. Registration became the default. Before the bill became law, legislators even amended it to presume that anyone improperly registered through the automatic system acted with official authorization—not criminal intent.
One year later (2019), they expanded driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
Anyone paying attention could see the obvious question: What happens when those systems collide?
Now we know!
Even the finger-pointing exposes how poorly this process was designed. “Poorly” unless, of course, your GOAL is to manipulate elections. In that case, it was damn near perfect.
Sherrill is blaming the Murphy Administration and the software company. IDEMIA, the technology contractor in the hot seat, says it merely transmitted information from MVC and that the Division of Elections bears ultimate responsibility for verifying voter eligibility before registrations become official.
If that’s true, then this wasn’t one software malfunction. It was multiple layers of government failing simultaneously.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice clearly believes the matter deserves far more scrutiny. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has demanded detailed records on all 6,600 registrations and the roughly 400 ballots cast, ordered the preservation of evidence, and indicated the disclosure bolsters DOJ’s effort to obtain New Jersey’s statewide voter registration records.
Here’s the question nobody in Trenton wants to answer:
If this happened for one year, why should anyone believe it didn’t happen before?
New Jersey needs more than another internal investigation conducted by the same government that created this mess.
The state needs an independent audit of every voter registration generated through MVC, full cooperation with federal investigators, immediate removal of every ineligible registrant, and a suspension of automatic voter registration until public confidence can be restored. We should probably audit the results of 2024 and 2025, too, since those are the two major elections that transpired after the June 2023 to June 2024 timeframe of “the glitch” heard ’round the world.
Politicians will keep insisting this was merely an unfortunate mistake.
Don’t buy it.
When government intentionally dismantles safeguards, expands eligibility for driver’s licenses to people who cannot legally vote, automates voter registration, weakens accountability, and then expresses surprise when ineligible people wind up on the voter rolls, the real failure isn’t the software.
It’s the system they designed. On purpose, knowing full well what would happen.
