Voter Registration Mistake Chills Relationship Between Mikie Sherrill And Democratic Predecessor

When Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday announced that several thousand non-citizens were accidentally added to New Jersey’s voter rolls three years ago, she laid much of the blame on her predecessor and fellow Democrat, former Gov. Phil Murphy.

Sherrill said she was “appalled” by the last administration’s “reckless failures” and a lack of transparency that she’d only learned of the mishap last week.

“For too long, the Trenton playbook has been to avoid tackling and solving tough problems,” she said. “This failure didn't occur under my watch, but accountability starts now, because the people of New Jersey shouldn't have to wait a year for a problem to get solved or two years to learn it even happened.”

Murphy, who cordially handed over the office to Sherrill on Jan. 20, has kept mum on the controversy. A spokesperson for the governor declined to comment Monday and Tuesday.

The voting snafu is not the first break between Sherrill and Murphy since she won the gubernatorial election in a landslide in November, but it’s by far the biggest one.

And given the size of the error — and the way it feeds into President Donald Trump’s narratives about voter fraud and his push for a federal law to require voter ID — it’s likely to reverberate ahead of the midterm elections. Sherrill said a “software error” had led to 6,600 non-citizens being registered to vote with the Motor Vehicle Commission between 2023 and 2024, and about 400 non-citizens who were improperly registered cast votes.

Murphy’s silence has left unanswered several pressing questions Sherrill didn’t explicitly ask, but that naturally follow from her announcement.

Why was the problem, which according to Sherrill lasted a year before it was discovered in 2024, not disclosed to the public by Murphy? Why weren’t those voters stricken from the rolls as soon as the error was caught? How much did Murphy and his top staff know about the problem? And were any close election outcomes decided by non-citizen voters?

“I would want to know: Did Gov. Murphy know anything at any point in time, and when did he know it, if at all?” said state Sen. Michael Testa, a Republican who’s considered a potential contender to challenge Sherrill in 2029. “What I found to be really unfortunate about all this is how dismissive so many people in the Democrat Party were of this even being a possibility. “

It’s not uncommon for new governors to blame their predecessors for the problems they inherit, even when they’re from the same party. But Sherrill began using Murphy as a foil as soon as she became governor.

Just days after taking office in January, Sherrill criticized Murphy and legislative Democrats for what she characterized as a last minute “feeding frenzy” for adding $128 million in spending and tax incentives to renovate the Prudential Center in Newark.

“I just ran an entire campaign on driving down costs for everyone, and then the Legislature and former governor just blow up the budget at the 11th hour,” Sherrill told NJ.com just days after her swearing-in. (Sherrill herself would pull a somewhat similar move in her first budget by signing a $359 million supplemental spending bill that made her Fiscal Year 2027 budget appear slimmer by tacking the spending on to the expiring budget).

But things got more tense with Sherrill’s approach to the World Cup, which the soccer-crazed Murphy and first lady Tammy Murphy — who even co-own a women’s soccer team — had successfully lobbied for New Jersey to host the final.

A month after taking office, Sherrill took the first shot in canceling a major World Cup “Fan Fest” planned for Liberty State Park in favor of dozens of smaller watch parties around the state. The event had been announced by Tammy Murphy, who chaired the event’s New York New Jersey Host Committee, a year before.

Then Sherrill announced train tickets to World Cup matches would cost a staggering $150, which the agency later reduced to $98 with the help of private sponsors. In the announcement, Sherrill alleged FIFA was earning $11 billion off the World Cup while sticking New Jersey with a $48 million transportation bill. Though she took no direct shots at her predecessor, the blame was implied when she referred to FIFA’s agreement with New Jersey as one “that my Administration inherited” and she pledged not to “subsidize” World Cup expenses on the backs of New Jersey taxpayers.

The host committee, in turn, worked with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration to offer $20 bus rides between New York City and the games, which likely cost NJ Transit tens of thousands of riders, resulting in half-full trains that, by the Sherrill administration's own math, would not cover the expenses.

New Jersey Republicans — some of whom warned about the potential for non-citizens to be registered to vote as the state debated enacting automatic voter registration at Motor Vehicle Commission offices and later allowing undocumented immigrants to qualify for driver’s licenses — said they understand the problem isn’t Sherrill’s fault. But they said the solution needs to go beyond fixing that one mistake.

Republican State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon said that even though the glitch Sherrill announced was the state’s fault, the registration process is still effectively an “honor system” in which it’s up to non-citizens to declare their status so that they’re not registered.

“I think this is damage control. We believe it’s still happening,” O’Scanlon said. “There should be no honor system or unintentional way for a non-citizen to register to vote. The Sherrill administration should be saying they’re going to institute exactly that.”

Democrats waived off questions of widespread fraud, saying roughly 400 voters is a miniscule percentage of the voter pool and that the Trump administration is exploiting it “in their desperate attempt to find mass voter fraud.”

“It should have never happened. It’s been fixed,” said Democratic state Sen. Andrew Zwicker. “New Jersey elections are safe, they are secure, and we will not let Donald Trump and his cronies intimidate us in New Jersey.”

But Senate Republican Leader Anthony Bucco said Democrats should join Republicans in enacting voter ID requirements.

“I think she has to get to a point where the blame game stops. Stop blaming Governor Murphy. Yes, this happened on his watch. But people in this particular situation, especially when it comes to voter integrity, political blame is not the answer,” he said. “ People want both parties working together to solve the issue.”