New Jersey admitted software errors let thousands of noncitizens onto its voter rolls.
Weeks later Homeland Security said Trenton had finally agreed to help clean up the mess.
Now Sherrill's own team says that agreement never happened.
DHS Says New Jersey Agreed to Fix Its Noncitizen Voter Rolls
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted a thank you to Governor Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday.
He said New Jersey's Secretary of State had confirmed the state would work with DHS to root out noncitizens illegally registered to vote.
Mullin didn't stop at gratitude.
He revealed DHS's count puts as many as 35,000 potential noncitizen registrations in New Jersey alone – six times the number Sherrill has publicly acknowledged.
"The 35,000 potential registered aliens we identified may only be the beginning," Mullin wrote on social media.
A governor who spent weeks resisting federal requests for voter data doesn't suddenly say yes out of nowhere.
Sherrill's Office Denies Any DHS Voter Roll Deal
One day later Sherrill's team pulled the rug out.
A Democratic source told Fox News they had no idea what Mullin was talking about.
There is no cooperation agreement between Trenton and DHS, the source said flatly.
The only paper trail anyone could produce was a routine legal letter from the Secretary of State's counsel responding to a congressional inquiry.
Sherrill used her Wednesday press conference to attack the administration instead of confirming any partnership.
She accused Republicans of exploiting the issue for political gain instead of addressing it.
That's rich, coming from the governor whose own agency put the noncitizens on the rolls in the first place.
New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission registered thousands of people who told the state directly they were not citizens.
Sherrill's own numbers show about 5,100 of those registrations have already been placed in deleted status.
Another 1,450 are pending review while county officials go through them individually.
Nearly 400 people who should never have been on the rolls cast ballots in recent elections anyway.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Bucco says New Jerseyans deserve full answers about what happened and how it happened.
He's right, and Trenton is doing everything possible to make sure they never find out.
Noncitizen Voter Roll Errors Have Hit States for Decades
New Jersey didn't invent this problem, and it won't be the last state to get caught with it.
Oregon's DMV is still finding noncitizens mislabeled as citizens in cases stretching back to 2010, and thirteen of them cast actual ballots before anyone noticed.
Ohio flagged 521 cases of potential noncitizen voting between 2019 and 2023.
Connecticut is now investigating how a noncitizen ended up registered under that same automatic system, a decade after Hartford settled with the Justice Department over it.
Texas, Alabama, Florida and Louisiana have all had federal prosecutors bring cases against noncitizens who registered or voted unlawfully in recent years.
One of them, a British citizen in Texas, cast ballots in more than one election over a decade before anyone caught her.
Every one of these states ran the same "motor voter" system Democrats have insisted for thirty years is foolproof.
It isn't, and Sherrill's own admission proves it.
DHS Says 250,000 Noncitizens Are Registered in Four States
DHS says the pattern goes far beyond New Jersey.
The department claims it has found more than 250,000 potential noncitizen registrations across California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania combined, on top of another 28,000 in states that actually cooperated.
Whether that final number holds up to scrutiny is exactly the point – it can't be checked, because all four of those Democrat-run states have refused to hand DHS their voter files.
If the rolls were clean, handing over the data would cost Sherrill and her allies nothing.
This is why Trump has pushed the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Every Democrat blocking that bill in the Senate is betting voters won't notice why they're blocking it.
Sherrill can call this a distraction all she wants, but she can't name a single governor in America who wants noncitizens on the rolls under his own watch.
The bigger story here isn't a software glitch buried in a state agency.
It's a political class that spent three decades swearing this never happens, now caught hiding the paperwork while it tries to spin a public denial into a non-story.
Sources:
- Charles Creitz, "Sherrill Escalates Trump Fight Over Voter Fiasco Day After Mullin Praises NJ Cooperation," Fox News, August 20, 2026.
- Tom Gantert, "New Jersey Agrees to Work With DHS on Voter Rolls," The Epoch Times, August 18, 2026.
- Fox News Digital, "Noncitizen Voter Registrations Found Across US States for 25 Years," Fox News, August 1, 2026.
- Daily Signal Staff, "Why Can't States Find Noncitizen Voters Faster?" The Daily Signal, August 13, 2026.
- Department of Homeland Security, "DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin Sends Letters to Secretaries of State Warning About Non-Citizens on Voter Rolls," DHS.gov, July 17, 2026.
- Department of Homeland Security, "DHS Cracks Down on Non-Citizens Illegally Voting in New Jersey," DHS.gov, July 31, 2026.
