Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey pushed back Thursday on the Department of Justice’s demand that the state hand over the names and other personal information of roughly 6,600 noncitizens who were mistakenly added to voting rolls in 2023 and 2024.
Roughly 400 of those voters later cast ballots in New Jersey, the governor announced this week. They were allowed to vote because of a software error at the Motor Vehicle Commission, despite having disclosed that they were not citizens.
“It is not a surprise to me that the federal government, that the Trump administration, wants to weaponize this against people as opposed to focusing on making sure that we’re running free and fair elections,” Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, said at a news conference on Thursday. “We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it.”
The governor has said the noncitizens had been added to the rolls “through no fault of their own” and would be removed from the rolls.
The Trump administration said it was prepared to arrest or deport those who had voted.
“They are subject to both prosecution as well as removal from the United States,” said Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in an appearance with the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.
A spokeswoman for the department, Kiersten Pels, said in a statement that “it is illegal for any noncitizen to vote in a federal election, and every unlawful vote dilutes the voice of American citizens.”
In a letter dated Tuesday, Ms. Dhillon gave the state five business days to hand over the voters’ names, addresses and nationalities.
Ms. Dhillon said in an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday that she believed there was more to come.
“That’s just going to be the beginning of our investigation into this,” she said. “We are going to get to the bottom of what happened here.”
Ms. Sherrill has said the software vendor she blamed for the error, Idemia, was being phased out of use in New Jersey.
Officials with Idemia, a technology company based in Virginia, has said it was the state’s Division of Elections’ responsibility to verify whether residents were eligible to vote.
Officials within the Sherrill administration became aware of the error only last week, the governor said. It had been discovered and corrected in 2024, while Philip D. Murphy was governor, but never publicly disclosed, Ms. Sherrill said.
The governor has said and that the state had “no evidence, at this time, that any elections were swayed,” including the 2024 presidential contest.
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