Jefferson Van Drew

Rep. Jeff Van Drew plans to hold hearings in the fall on New Jersey’s noncitizen voter fracas and is “absolutely exploring” the possibility of using Congress’s subpoena powers, he told POLITICO on Monday.

The South Jersey Republican, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight-focused subcommittee, said that his approach to any future investigation will depend on how much information Gov. Mikie Sherrill ’s administration releases willingly. Van Drew sent Sherrill a letter last week with 12 questions on how 6,600 noncitizens ended up on New Jersey’s voter rolls and what steps the state intends to take moving forward.

“If they are ignored or not answered at all, we will absolutely [explore] — and are currently exploring — the idea of subpoenas,” Van Drew said. The letter asked Sherrill for written responses by Aug. 21.

Republicans in the New Jersey Legislature have called for a state-level committee with subpoena powers to investigate the issue, but legislative Democrats have indicated that they’ll wait for an independent review commissioned by Sherrill to be completed before taking any action themselves. The timeline for that review, which is being conducted by an outside firm, has not been made public.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has set a much faster schedule for its demands, insisting that the Sherrill administration turn over names, addresses and other records by Tuesday on the noncitizens accidentally added to the state’s voter rolls. Sherrill has not said whether she’ll obey the request, but she has not sounded especially receptive: “We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government,” she said last week.

According to Sherrill, the 6,600 noncitizens were added to the rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 — more than a year before she took office as governor — and around 400 of them cast ballots in subsequent elections, though Sherrill has said she does not believe any of those ballots ever swayed an election. Blame for the error is still disputed, with state officials and the France-based vendor IDEMIA each pointing the finger at the other.

Van Drew , a Trump ally who was the lone member of the New Jersey delegation to vote against certifying Joe Biden ’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, was noncommittal when asked about the possibility of prosecuting or deporting the noncitizens who cast ballots, as top Trump administration officials have threatened to do.

“It depends on the case, and what the intent was,” he said. “Of those that voted and of those that were registered, how many of them possibly could have been felons or criminals? We don’t know. There’s some homework to be done.”

The snafu ties back to the state’s 2018 “motor voter” law, which gave those applying for driver’s licenses and other state IDs the option to automatically register to vote; noncitizens are meant to be screened out of that process under the law, but evidently were not during the affected period in 2023 and 2024. Van Drew , then a Democratic member of the state Senate, voted in favor of that bill in 2018 — and he said he has no regrets about that vote.

“How was I to assume that the agency would break the law?” he said. “When you sponsor a bill, vote for a bill, you assume that the government itself will obey the law as created by any legislature.”