Testimony before a congressional panel raised new questions about whether ineligible registrations predated the software failure disclosed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill.
WASHINGTON — New Jersey’s voter registration problems may stretch back more than a decade before the period identified by Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s administration, according to testimony presented during a congressional hearing Tuesday. The governor has not answered some hard questions, most importantly, why the information was withheld from the public for more than a decade.
Mike Inganamort, a Republican state assemblyman representing parts of Morris and Warren counties, said witnesses produced examples of noncitizens who had been registered to vote as early as 2012 and 2013.
🚨 Big news out of Washington today.
— Mike Inganamort (@MikeInganamort) September 15, 2026
New Jersey’s voter registration problems may go back a full decade before the Sherrill Administration disclosed them.
I’m on Capitol Hill today and met with Congressman Jeff Van Drew, who is leading a congressional hearing into New Jersey’s… pic.twitter.com/8H2pdhRzP3
The cases, he said, were not initially detected by the state. Instead, the individuals reportedly brought the registrations to officials’ attention themselves.
“New Jersey’s voter registration problems may go back a full decade before the Sherrill Administration disclosed them,” Inganamort wrote in a statement posted following the hearing.
Self-Reported Registrations Raise New Questions
Inganamort said he traveled to Capitol Hill and met with Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who chaired the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight hearing examining New Jersey’s voter registration system.
New Jersey attorney Jason Sena told lawmakers that public records uncovered cases involving noncitizens whose registrations dated to 2012 and 2013, according to testimony and accounts of the hearing.
The individuals reportedly sought to remove themselves from the voter rolls after discovering the problem or becoming concerned that the registrations could affect their immigration or naturalization status.
The cases described during the hearing involved people who reportedly identified the registrations themselves, not an investigation that first uncovered them through a state voter-roll audit as it was made to appear by the administration initially.
Inganamort said the examples undercut any suggestion that the problem began and ended with a software issue affecting Motor Vehicle Commission transactions between June 2023 and June 2024.
“They reported themselves,” Inganamort wrote. “There are a lot more questions to answer. Today was just the beginning.”
Sherrill Disclosed 6,600 Registrations
Sherrill announced in July that approximately 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens during MVC transactions had nevertheless been added to New Jersey’s voter rolls.
A preliminary review found that fewer than 400 people connected to those registrations later cast ballots. That number does not establish that every ballot was illegally cast by a noncitizen because some individuals may have become citizens after their MVC transactions or may otherwise have had outdated or conflicting records.
The Sherrill administration attributed the registrations to a software failure during the administration of former Gov. Phil Murphy. The identified problem was corrected in June 2024 but was not publicly disclosed until July 2026.
Sena’s testimony raised a separate issue: whether cases existed years before the MVC software failure and whether the state lacked a systematic process for detecting them.
Shore News Network previously reported on the congressional examination of the 6,600 disputed registrations, including conflicting testimony over the scope of the problem and how many affected registrants may have voted.
Registration Does Not Automatically Prove Fraud
Being improperly placed on a voter roll is not, by itself, proof that the registrant committed fraud.
The 2023 and 2024 cases disclosed by Sherrill involved applicants who reportedly told the MVC they were not citizens. Their records were nevertheless transmitted through the voter registration system.
The older cases cited by Sena could point to different registration pathways and would require examination of the original applications, citizenship timelines and voting histories to determine how each person entered the system and whether any illegal ballot was cast.
The hearing did not establish a statewide count of noncitizen registrations predating 2023. It also did not establish that the 2012 and 2013 cases resulted from the same processing problem identified by Sherrill.
The cases nevertheless create a new line of inquiry for lawmakers because they fall well outside the one-year window covered by the state’s initial disclosure.
Van Drew Presses State Over Delayed Disclosure
Van Drew said the public deserves to know how the registrations occurred, why the problem remained undisclosed for two years after it was corrected and whether the state’s current figure captures the full scope of the issue.
“The state knew there was a problem in June of 2024 and did not tell the public what happened until two years later,” Van Drew said in an official statement following the hearing.
Congressional Republicans have requested records from the New Jersey Department of State, the MVC and IDEMIA, the technology company involved in the state’s voter registration system.
IDEMIA has challenged the state’s description of the incident as a software malfunction. The company has said its system recorded applicants’ answers and made them available to state agencies. State officials maintain that records belonging to applicants who identified themselves as noncitizens should not have reached the Division of Elections.
Older Cases Could Expand the Investigation
If documents confirm that noncitizens remained registered beginning in 2012 or 2013, investigators will have to determine whether those were isolated errors or signs of a broader verification problem.
They will also have to establish whether election officials received prior notices from registrants, how those notices were handled and whether state agencies tracked similar requests for removal.
No evidence presented at the hearing established that the older registrations affected the result of any election. The testimony instead widened the timeline under scrutiny and challenged the state to explain how long improperly registered voters may have remained undetected.
The central question is no longer limited to what happened at the MVC in 2023 and 2024. Lawmakers are now asking whether New Jersey’s safeguards failed years earlier—and whether the only reason some cases came to light was that the affected noncitizens reported the problem themselves.
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