New Jersey says it was a computer glitch. Harmeet Dhillon says: prove it.
That’s the standoff now playing out between the Justice Department and Governor Mikie Sherrill, and it isn’t going away quietly. Dhillon, the DOJ’s top civil rights official, has given Sherrill five business days to hand over detailed records on some 6,600 people who ended up on New Jersey’s voter rolls after telling the state, in plain terms, that they weren’t citizens.
She renewed the demand this week, right after Sherrill’s office let slip a number that’s hard to shrug off: fewer than 400 of those people went on to actually vote. Fewer than 400 out of 6,600. Small comfort, if you’re keeping score — and Dhillon is keeping score.
“Ensuring that U.S. citizens’ votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizens’ votes is of paramount importance,” she wrote. It’s the kind of line that sounds like boilerplate until you remember it’s backed by a subpoena’s worth of specifics: names, birth dates, nationalities, addresses, registration dates, precincts.
For the roughly 400 who voted, DOJ wants to know exactly when and where those ballots were cast, plus anything tied to mail-in voting.
To be fair, none of this proves the votes themselves were illegal. That’s still an open question — arguably the question the records are meant to settle. Were these people eligible when they cast their ballots, or weren’t they? Nobody knows yet. That’s rather the point of asking.
Dhillon also told the state to preserve every scrap of paper connected to these registrations. Translation: this isn’t just a records request. It’s evidence-gathering for a fight already underway.
The Justice Department sued New Jersey back in February, after the state refused to hand over a full electronic copy of its voter rolls. Washington says federal law gives the attorney general the right to inspect that data and make sure states are keeping their lists clean. New Jersey has said, essentially, not so fast. The 6,600 names are new fuel for an old fire.
As for how it happened — Sherrill blames the motor vehicle agency. A “serious software error,” she called it, running from June 2023 to June 2024. Applicants would answer “no” when a kiosk asked if they were U.S. citizens, and the system would register them to vote anyway.
“Through no fault of their own,” in the governor’s words. She says she ordered an investigation and told officials to start removing the ineligible names once the problem surfaced.
Fine — but Dhillon isn’t inclined to take the state’s word for it and call it a day. Her letter frames the records as necessary to judge whether New Jersey is meeting its obligations under two federal laws — the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. And she’s telling the judge already overseeing the bigger lawsuit exactly what she’s found. A software glitch may explain how it started. It won’t be what ends it.
