6 events in Passaic County with a date

Republicans pounce as voter roll crisis lingers

By: Charles Stile
Political Stile
USA Today Network

..... Governor Mikie Sherrill demonstrated the preemptive damage control strategy on Tuesday, July 28, [2026] as the voter registration debacle continued to draw national attention.
..... As the politician firestorm kept building after her July 21 [2026] disclosure that as many as 6,600 non-citizens joined the New Jersey voter rolls during former Governor Phil Murphy's second term, Sherrill stuck to disciplined messaging, which was: I'm in charge, I'm working on it, I'll be transparent and, just as a reminder, this didn't happen under my watch.
..... A week after the disclosure, she announced an update that also attempted to downgrade the crisis from red alert to yellow.
..... Sherrill said that perhaps 2,100 of the flagged, improperly registered people may be citizens after all and hat her administration had referred those names to county election officials to examine. Meanwhile, the broader purge of the rolls continues, and state election officials have dispatched letters to the improperly registered. There is now an informational website.
..... On the same day, Sherrill continued poking away at the U.S. Department of Justice and President Donald Trump. The president is salivating over the voter registrations crisis, hoping it may, in the short run, bolster Republican support in the U.S. Senate for his SAVE America Act, which would impose new voter identification requirements.
..... Sherrill rejected the Justice Department's request to hand over files on the 6,600, saying there is "no legal basis" to do so.
..... All of this happened as Sherrill ceremoniously signed the John B. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act of New Jersey, modeled after the landmark - and recently gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court - federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
..... This celebration of he "good trouble" civil rights icon Lewis offered an ironic backdrop to the political trouble that she was forced to deal with and, apparently, inherited from Murphy.
..... At one point, Sherrill reminisced about her time serving a tan election protection hot-line when she was an attorney.
..... It seemed, she said, "that we were past some of the voting rights problems.
..... But weekly updates are not going to put this voter-roll mess comfortably in the past.
..... The clamor may drop a decibel or two in the dead of summer, but it's not going to go away until there is some from of clarity about just what happened at the Motor Vehicle Commission.
..... All we know at this points what Sherrill announced on July 21 [2026] - that potentially thousands o non-citizens were improperly regist4ed as voters when they applied for a New Jersey driver's license or ot4her documents, a process that was cerated under New Jersey's "motor voter" law in 2019.
..... But when they pressed an electronic keypad declaring that they were not United States citizens, a glitch in the software run by IDEMIA, a French contractor, reportedly processed them as voters anyway.
..... Sherill pinned the blame on IDEMIA and is seeking a new vendor, but the company says the responsibility of validating the voter registration falls to the state, not the vendor.
..... Sherrill took the first step by hiring Chiese Shahinian & Giantonmasi PC. Jeffery Chiese, a close ally of former Governor Chris Christie, is a parter in the firm. Christie appointed Chiese as a Republican U.S. senator to fill out the term of Democrat Frank Lautenberg, whose seat was left vacant when he died in 2013. the firm is expected to conduct an "independent" and bipartisan investigation, although it;s not clear when it will complete the work.

Republicans continue to pounce, in Trenton and in Washington

..... Meanwhile, state Republicans are demanding a bipartisan, legislative investigation with subpoena power to probe the effort.
..... The GOP shunted to the sidelines in Trenton for nearly two decades, says it has been sounding the alarm about the risk of the mishaps and non-citizens slipping onto the voter rolls since "motor voter' was created at the MVC, and its;s convinced that this is the tip of the iceberg.
..... Last week, [07/30/2026] state Republican Party chairwoman Christine Giordano Hanlon, who is also the Monmouth county clerk, said the state GOP's own "election integrity" review discovered non-citizens on the rolls who registered outside the time period disclosed by the governor.
..... Hanlon also said some of the non-citizens had gone to the county offices asking to be removed when their voting registration was flagged as part of federal screening for citizenship status.
..... The Republicans are demanding that the registration process be suspended until the issue is sorted out.
..... And they dispute Sherrill's explanation that it was the computer malfunction is solely to blame.
..... "So how do y9ou explain a three-year cover-up involving three state agencies?" asked Assemblyman Greg McGuckin R-Ocean, in an op-ed for the USA Today Network New Jersey. "Simple: Blame the computer."
..... McGuckin and others believe that there is far more to the story, possibly involving a cover-up by state officials.
..... But they carefully avoided any rhetoric to suggest that they were pouncing on the issue to fan the conspiracy theories of the Make America Great Again stalwarts of Trump that the Democrats are systematically enlisting illegal voters in a bid to seize power in the November [2026] midterms.
..... State Senator Declan O'Scanion, R-Monmouth, said he brought concerns about non-citizens to MVC officials several years ago but encountered indifference.
..... That experience, he said, suggested that the classified at the time "opened the door" for ineligible voters to be registered "on purpose."
..... The whole system relies on an "honor system" in which applicants attest to their status without being adequately vetted. It now needs a top-to-bottom study and possibly an overhaul.
..... "They can sugarcoat it all they want, but until they broaden this investigation, until they acknowledge these other flaws ... that's a problem for her," O'Scanlon said of Sherrill.
..... In Washington, U.S. Representative Jeff Van Drew, the South Jersey Republican who serves a chair of the House Judiciary Committee's oversight subcommittee, has said he is "absolutely exploring: subpoenas and has given the Sherrill administration until August 21 [2026] to answer a series of questions about the issue.
..... Van Drew, who hired a campaign operative convicted of voter fraud, bribery and blackmail, is also a Trump loyalist.
..... But despite the Republican pressure, Matt Hale, an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall, suggest that Sherrill's messaging strategy can be effective if repeated consistently.
..... "I think she has one advantage: This was not her watch," hale said. "The more she can say that it's Murphy's fault and Trump is weaponizing it, that's a good start."

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