New Jersey admitted thousands of noncitizens were mistakenly added to its voter rolls, and Sen. Andy Kim’s response was to insist the scandal still was not the election crisis President Donald Trump has been warning about.
The Democrat tried to draw that line Tuesday on MS NOW’s “All In” after Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed that roughly 6,600 people who said they were not U.S. citizens were registered through a state Motor Vehicle System error.
Some of them voted and that was the opening Republicans seized on, especially with Trump already pushing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and the Department of Homeland Security claiming far higher potential noncitizen registration numbers in New Jersey and other states.
Kim’s first response was to call the New Jersey failure unacceptable.
“And I have to say, look, I mean, this is unacceptable and this needs to be fixed immediately and needs people need to be held accountable for that, especially if they’ve known this since it’s happened a couple of years ago,” he remarked.
Democrat Senator Andy Kim acknowledges that there are 6,600 non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey but still says it is "not akin to what Donald Trump was talking about.”
Is Kim's Trump Derangement Syndrome really that bad? pic.twitter.com/dO4BYOWH2U
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“So yes, you know, when there are mistakes, when there are things that are broken, we need to fix it.”
Then he moved straight to going after Trump, rather than focusing on the shocking statistics.
“But we also need to make sure that we’re looking at the problems in the right size, that this is not akin to what Donald Trump was talking about,” Kim said during the appearance.
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His argument was that New Jersey’s admitted registration failure should not be treated as proof of the national election-integrity case Trump has been making.
“Yes, this is something that needs fixing, but it’s not this widespread systemic problem that Trump has been using and weaponizing to try to push forward a very extreme agenda when it comes to, you know, deterring voters and other things that he’s been trying to push on with his conspiracy theories and delusions about winning the 2020 election,” Kim added.
Sherrill’s announcement put the blame on a state software failure that ran between June 2023 and June 2024, before she took office.
The problem started with people applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards.
They answered “no” on a keypad when asked whether they were U.S. citizens, but the system still registered them.
“In the case of this error, some individuals indicated that they weren’t citizens and weren’t eligible to vote, but the software registered them anyway. The error in the software was corrected a year later in June of 2024,” Sherrill commented during a press conference.
The governor’s announcement described the applicants as being registered “through no fault of their own.”
“These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway,” Sherrill’s office stated.
The preliminary voting figure was smaller than the registration total, but still politically explosive. Sherrill put the number below 400.
“Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted,” she added. “They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.”
Sherrill said she found out about the issue last Wednesday, then ordered an investigation and a voter-roll review aimed at clearing the ineligible registrations.
The state’s Division of Elections is working on those removals.
“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” Sherrill said.
She also stressed that the error happened under the previous administration, led by Democrat Phil Murphy, and used the same message to accuse Trump of spreading lies about the legitimacy of American elections.
New Jersey Republicans treated the disclosure as a voter-ID argument.
For NJ Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio, R-Hackettstown, the Motor Vehicle Commission failure showed Democrats had ignored a problem that could have been caught at the polls.
“This is another example of Democrats failing to secure elections. If Democrats would embrace voter ID – which has broad public support – the MVC’s voter registration failures would have been corrected at the ballot box,” DiMaio said.
“New Jersey needs voter ID, because citizens deserve confidence in election results and Trenton Democrats have proven they do not respond to known problems in the voter rolls.”
The timing gave Trump’s side an immediate opening. Five days earlier, Trump had delivered a prime-time speech laying out what he called evidence that voter fraud is endemic across the country.
In that address, Trump said DHS had found 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Friday letters from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid out the department’s review of public voter registration records against federal immigration data.
The department found thousands of possible matches and asked state election officials to work with DHS on identity verification before any action was taken.
For New Jersey alone, the DHS estimate was much larger than Sherrill’s figure. The department put the possible number of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls as high as 35,152.
DHS also said 19,497 New Jersey registrants had names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers that matched noncitizens in its preliminary review.
The White House used Sherrill’s admission as ammunition for Trump’s election bill.
“Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot. Time and again, they have been proven wrong,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson commented.
“As President Trump has said, there is nothing more important than the integrity of our elections. And this latest incident underscores the absolute necessity of the SAVE America Act,” she added.
“American voters deserve to have confidence that our elections are safe and secure – President Trump will never stop fighting to make that happen and all patriotic Americans should join in his effort.”
The SAVE America Act would require states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls, require Americans to prove citizenship when registering and require photo identification.
Kim ended his answer by pointing to election equipment, ballots and cybersecurity as areas he wants upgraded.
“We need to make sure we’re protecting it from cyber security and other issues like that. So those are things we need to make sure we’re pushing hard on,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance put the pressure directly on Kim and Sen. Cory Booker after Sherrill’s announcement.
“If only there was a way to stop this type of ‘software error’ that allowed non citizens to vote in our elections,” Vance wrote on X.
“I hope Senators @CoryBooker and @SenatorAndyKim will join us in voting to pass the SAVE America Act to ensure that only eligible American voters can participate in New Jersey elections, and all elections across the United States.”
