Bryan Steil

Lawmakers are demanding answers from New Jersey officials after the governor disclosed that thousands of noncitizens were mistakenly added to the state’s voter rolls and roughly 400 allegedly cast ballots.

Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Bryan Steil, R-Wis., sent a letter this week to New Jersey Lt. Gov. and Secretary of State Dale Caldwell seeking more information about the state’s compliance with federal election laws. Including all guardrails currently in place to prevent noncitizen voter registration.

The questions that we're asking is to make sure this error never happens again,” Steil told The National News Desk Thursday.

The request follows an announcement from Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill that, prior to her taking office, 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly added to the state’s voter rolls in 2023 and 2024. Sherrill said a “serious software error” in the state’s motor vehicle system was to blame, specifically during some driver’s license or ID applications.

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,” Gov. Sherill said while announcing the error in July.

The vendor that maintains the software for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, IDEMIA, pushed back on Sherrill’s comments, saying New Jersey agencies were at fault.

All 6,600 individuals indicated ‘Yes’ to wanting to register to vote and ‘NO’ to being a US Citizen," a spokesperson told the New York Post in July.

Meanwhile, Steil said additional investigations could be possible. “We're starting with New Jersey but I wouldn't say we're ending there. I would think that, we have, everything is on the table. The goal here is just to get to the bottom of this. Exactly what went wrong. Who made the error and how do we prevent this error from every happening again,” he said.

On Thursday, Steil also addressed election-related concerns in his home state. He said he recently sent a letter to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections following local reports that a convicted felon voted in a 2024 federal general election.

We want to get to the bottom, really in my home state of Wisconsin, about how is the state of Wisconsin providing information to our clerks about whether or not individuals are ineligible to vote,” he said.

In the letter, Steil and Jordan gave Caldwell until Aug. 17 to produce the documentation listed in their letter. The National News Desk reached out to Sherrill’s office multiple times for comment and will update upon hearing back.