The contractor said it has never reported any software problems, despite New Jersey’s claims that there were voter registration glitches.
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A New Jersey driver’s license company denies responsibility for the 6,600 noncitizens caught in the voter registration process, a company spokesperson told USA TODAY.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced on July 21 that up to 6,600 non-Americans were unable to register to vote in New Jersey in 2023 and 2024 due to a software flaw. Of those, less than 400 people voted. Sherrill said he first learned of the issue in July, ordered noncitizens removed from the rolls and ordered an investigation into why the administration of his predecessor, Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, did not inform the public about the issue.
“It is unacceptable that a vendor would release software with such obvious errors,” Sherrill said of IDEMIA, a New Jersey contractor he has worked with for 40 years.
However, IDEMIA spokeswoman Lisa Shoemaker told USA TODAY on July 23 that “characterizing it as a glitch is not accurate.”
“There were no glitches or software errors,” Shoemaker said. The company also handles a wide range of federal contracts, including TSA pre-screening at airports and “biometric and secure ID solutions” for the Department of Defense.
The controversy comes amid a national battle over non-citizen votes, with supporters of President Donald Trump arguing that states allowing hundreds of non-citizens to vote is evidence of Democratic election fraud and that Congress must pass Trump’s election integrity bill, the SAVE America Act.
On July 24, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) led 18 of his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives to demand answers from Sherrill.
“For years, Republicans have been sounding the alarm about weaknesses in voter registration systems, poor control of voter rolls, and the risk that noncitizens would be allowed to register and vote in national elections, which is illegal under federal law,” Van Drew wrote. “Too often, these concerns are dismissed as exaggerated or unfounded. New Jersey’s admission shows that these vulnerabilities are real and that even systems supposedly designed to screen ineligible applicants can fail on a large scale.”
Democrats deny these allegations, and Trump supporters say they have provided no evidence that anyone intentionally allowed noncitizens to register or vote.
Sherrill said those who voted illegally are registered as Democrats, Republicans and independents. “At this point, there is no evidence that the election was swayed,” he said at a July 21 press conference.
The governor’s office declined to comment because the investigation is ongoing.
A New Jersey official with knowledge of the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the governor’s office was watching the comments pending an investigation into how the previous administration learned of the issue and how it responded.
“Whenever someone answers ‘no’ to a citizenship question, that record should not be sent to the Elections Department. It was a software error by IDEMIA,” the official said, citing a private government contractor.
The Department of Justice also announced that it would investigate the incident. The case became public days after the Trump administration announced it had discovered more than 250,000 potential noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. All states have issued denials, citing a lack of large numbers of non-citizens on their voter rolls.
Days later, New Jersey’s governor blamed the contractor for mistakes that added thousands of noncitizens between 2023 and 2024. These names have since been removed.
IDEMIA handles driver’s licenses for many states
In an email response to USA TODAY’s inquiries, the contractor denied responsibility for the mistake.
IDEMIA announces it manufactures the majority of U.S. driver’s licenses, has contracts with motor vehicle departments in 36 states.
Shoemaker told USA TODAY that the company won the contract to collect self-identified responses in 2023 under written specifications issued by the state of New Jersey, including a box to check interest in voter registration from people applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state-issued ID.
Shoemaker said the specifications also included the order of questions. Why not register to vote first? Second, are you a U.S. citizen? And third, only those who say yes to citizenship choose their political affiliation.
The state tested the software itself and approved it for implementation in 2023, Shoemaker told USA TODAY.
In June 2024, the New Jersey Department of Elections flagged 6,600 files that did not include political party affiliation in the data it received from the Motor Vehicle Commission and asked why.
The answer is state-specific design, Shoemaker said. Those who answered “no” to citizenship were not invited to join the party, but all those who answered “yes” to the first question were retained in the system, so their records were saved in the Motor Vehicle Commission’s (MVC) database.
According to Shoemaker, records were never stored beyond MVC’s own servers, per the specifications of the contract. They basically kept a record of people who said they wanted to register. They were not registered.
“IDEMIA does not control or manage voter registration; our role is simply to collect self-reported citizenship and interest data,” Shoemaker said. “The IDEMIA software is not currently, and has never been, configured to send any data to the New Jersey Department of Elections.”
Customized for New Jersey, IDEMIA software is designed to collect verified answers to questions in accordance with the state’s requirements. That data is then stored within MVC’s database, Shoemaker said.
At the Motor Vehicles Commission, “the criteria that the MVC uses to collect and transmit the report that includes any citizenship questions to the elections department is ultimately up to the MVC,” she added.
Shoemaker said the Motor Vehicle Commission asked IDEMIA in June 2024 to change its system settings so that people who want to register to vote but answer “no” to the citizenship question are automatically treated as “voter decliners in the system.”
IDEMIA made this change, which went into effect in September 2024.
Company loses contract with New Jersey
Later that year, New Jersey announced it would rebid the MVC contract, which IDEMIA claims has nothing to do with the performance of the original contract, including any change requests.
Shoemaker said her company was not replaced by the revised citizenship questions. The company entered a competitive process to retain its position as a driver service provider, but lost out to a lower bid by a company called Thales.
Additionally, Shoemaker told USA TODAY that New Jersey “did not indicate there was an error” and did not expand the problem beyond changing the so-called system requirements. “There was no letter, no formal notification,” she said. “System changes requested by the state were handled as part of normal customer relations.”
Supporting that claim, Shoemaker said IDEMIA was one of only two finalists invited to submit a best and final offer for a new contract in 2026.
New Jersey officials said Rosalie Johnson, the Motor Vehicle Commission’s new chief administrator, was already phasing out IDEMIA and working with a new vendor to improve long-standing problems such as long wait times when the noncitizen registrant case was discovered in July.
IDEMIA says it is New Jersey’s responsibility to explain how the information left the MVC and was placed on the voter rolls without being verified.
Shoemaker said the New Jersey State Department of Elections “is ultimately responsible for verifying voting eligibility.” “The information submitted by IDEMIA must still be verified and adjudicated by the Elections Department.”
Multiple states told USA TODAY this week that they have systems in place to check citizenship after voter registrations submitted at the DMV reach election officials, a process aimed at preventing issues like the one that occurred in New Jersey.
