Tangle - New Jersey’s voter registration scandal.

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

On Tuesday, July 21, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced that an error in the state’s motor-vehicles system software resulted in approximately 6,600 noncitizens being registered to vote, and a preliminary assessment showed roughly 400 of them cast a ballot in at least one election. Sherrill said the improper registrations occurred during former Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) term and ordered an investigation into the error.Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!A guest essay.Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, a group widely condemned by other Christian churches and organizations for its extreme, vulgar rhetoric. As an adult, Phelps-Roper left the congregation and became one of its chief critics, as well as a writer and activist. In a guest essay for Tangle, she wrote about what she lost when she left — and what aspects of her upbringing she’s now reclaiming. You can read it here.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: Should the noncitizens who voted be prosecuted? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. All right. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and it is a champ-packed Monday morning. I got to just start with a quick story. A few months ago, I read this piece. I can't even remember where it was.

I think maybe in the Atlantic about younger Americans rediscovering malls as a hangout spot. And I honestly was skeptical. But on Sunday afternoon, yesterday, I spent four or five hours at the local mall with my wife. And I have to say, the experience obliterated my skepticism. It was the first time I'd been in a mall personally in years. And it felt like I had just been transported 20 years into the past. High schoolers running around in gaggles, the elderly shopping with grandchildren, families out for the day, 20-somethings on dates. It was oddly happening and retro and even weirder brought me some joy just experiencing it all.

So today, we're diving into another pastime, which is some election chicanery in New Jersey. But the modern kind with alleged software errors and public blame games instead of mafiosos and smoke-filled rooms. Also, a reader wrote in with a question about cyclosporiasis and a feel-good wedding story to round it all out. It's a very good episode, and I'm joined today by John Lull, who I'm going to pass it over to now. I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We're going to jump right into it with today's quick hits. First up, the U.S. and Iran paused strikes over the weekend following roughly two weeks of attacks by each side.

President Donald Trump has reportedly opted against escalating the U.S. campaign amid discussions of renewed peace talks and concerns over missile interceptor stockpiles, which the president has denied or a concern. Number two, three people were killed and four wounded in a mass shooting at the Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington. One suspect has been arrested and police are searching for a second. Number three, a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration's request to overturn a lower court decision and allow the administration to implement stricter mail-in voting rules

ahead of the 26 midterm elections. Number four, Maine Democratic Party delegates selected former State Senate President Troy Jackson to replace Graham Platner as the party's nominee in the Senate race against Senator Susan Collins. And number five, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that four additional states are experiencing a cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce, bringing the total number of states in the outbreak to nine. Now to the Department of Justice announcing that it's investigating after New Jersey's governor disclosed that more than 6,000 people who said they were not U.S. citizens were mistakenly registered to vote.

Cheryl says that because of a computer error, about 6,600 non-citizens who were registering for a driver's license were also improperly registered to vote. She says a 2023 software glitch at the state's Motor Vehicle Commission led people who are not citizens and were not eligible to vote to be registered anyway. On Tuesday, July 21st, New Jersey Governor Mikey Cheryl announced that an error in the state's motor vehicle system software resulted in approximately 6,600 non-citizens being registered to vote, and a preliminary assessment showed roughly 400 of them cast a ballot in at least one election. Cheryl said the improper registrations occurred during former Governor Phil Phil.

Murphy's term and ordered an investigation into the error. New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission allows people applying for driver's licenses or identification cards to simultaneously register to vote if they certify that they are U.S. citizens and eligible to cast ballots. Governor Cheryl said that between June 2023 and June 24, an error in the state's registration software mistakenly registered people who indicated they were not citizens. She added that the issue was eventually caught and corrected by the Murphy administration, but criticized the former governor for a lack of transparency in failing to disclose the discovery. IBEMIA, the contractor that operates the state system, refuted Cheryl's claim that a software glitch caused the issue. Lisa Schumacher, a company spokesperson, said the company

does not register voters on behalf of the state. Instead, it accurately collected and stored applicants' responses to a series of questions about their interest in registering to vote, citizenship status, and if eligible, party affiliation. According to Schumacher, the state was responsible for how it used the information in the MVC's database. In response to Cheryl's announcement, the White House reaffirmed its call for Congress to pass the Save America Act, which would require states to use a federal system to confirm a prospective voter's eligibility before they can register to vote in federal elections. Separately, Representative Jeff Van Drew, the Republican from New Jersey, and a group of

Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Governor Cheryl asking for a complete accounting of how this failure occurred. Cheryl and other Democrats have rejected claims that the incident validates broader concerns over election security and fraud. Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity. For the past 10 years, he's cried wolf and peddled bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence, Cheryl said. Today, we'll share views from the right-left and New Jersey writers on the incident and then Isaac's tape. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. First of all, let's start with what the right is saying.

Many on the right say the incident validates concerns about election system vulnerabilities. Some argue the Save America Act would not have prevented this error. In the Washington Examiner, Zachary Faria said, New Jersey admits that the voter fraud that doesn't happen was happening. Democrats in liberal media have said that evidence of voter fraud, specifically fraud committed by non-citizens, is essentially non-existent. Now, New Jersey's Democratic governor has effectively killed that talking point fairier, Root.

We have gone from the New York Times saying just two weeks ago that widespread non-citizen voting is a problem that doesn't exist to the Democratic governor of a state admitting that around 400 non-citizens illegally voted after that state gave over 6,000 of them the ability to do so. The Democratic Party, willfully or not, is only making this problem worse. Aside from giving non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, drivers, licenses while running an automatic voter registration program through the DMV, many Democrat-run cities want to or do allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. Democratic politicians also rapidly oppose any efforts to require voter identification, Ferry said. When you combine that with the

fact that Democrats are making it easier for non-citizens and illegal immigrants to vote, both unintentionally and intentionally, and oppose any safeguards under the guise of voter suppression, you have a blooming voter fraud issue. In Cato at Liberty, Stephen Richard explored whether the Save America Act would have prevented the New Jersey non-citizen voter snafu. Arizona was the first state to require documented proof of citizenship. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters satisfied this requirement by showing a passport or birth certificate to the state's motor vehicle division when getting a driver's license, Richard Root. If New Jersey had the same system as Arizona, the 6,600 non-citizens in question still would have indicated that they are not citizens.

Accordingly, they would not have provided documented proof of citizenship. Nothing would have changed. The software error would have still indicated that they met the citizenship requirement. The registrar still would have relied on this inaccurate information. It's possible that the final version of the Save America Act could have been structured differently. It could require that even if the individual provides documented proof of citizenship to a motor vehicle division, he or she must also provide a birth certificate to the registrar for a new voter registration and every subsequent registration modification, Richard said.

This would have made the New Jersey error less likely, but it would impose new burdens on hundreds of millions of voting Americans. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. Some on the left say the incident is proof that non-citizen voting is rare and detectable. Others say that Democrats should adjust their approach to voter fraud concerns. In USA Today, Chris Brennan said New Jersey's non-citizen voter disclosure shows the system works. The loudest view about election integrity and voter fraud shouted at every opportunity by President Donald Trump, but not supported by evidence, is that voter fraud is rampant in our country, especially among non-citizens' allegedly casting ballots, Brennan wrote. The more nuanced view with a foundation in actual evidence is that voter fraud and non-citizen voting are rare occurrences that our election infrastructure is designed to catch and eliminate and to prosecute as necessary.

The news out of New Jersey proves that second point of view. Trump has been banging away Republicans in Congress to pass his so-called Save America Act, which he casts as crucial for election integrity, but which is really just an unconstitutional power grab, Redden said. Any American who interacts with the government in any way knows mistakes happen. That applies to elections and how they're run. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress would have you believe that those mistakes are intentional. But these kinds of problems crop up in red states too.

In New York magazine, Ed Kilgore suggested, New Jersey shows Democrats need a better voter fraud strategy. To be clear, the 6,600 non-citizen voter registrations is well below the 35,152 DHS claimed for New Jersey in the recent report Trump cited, based on a database created for an entirely different purpose that is reported to be full of errors. But it's like a camel's nose under the tent, validating all sorts of mega suspicions that the real fraud is vast and underreported. reported, Kilgore wrote. Cheryl has not yet offered a proactive proposal to prevent the sort of errors she detected and reversed. Cheryl and every other state-level Democrats should clarify their own views about election integrity and possible non-citizen voting. At the federal level, Democrats should also modify their longstanding national voting rights proposals to include a modest and reasonable system for

verifying voter eligibility at the polls and for obtaining and casting mail ballots. It may need to be no more extensive than the signature verification system, California, and other universal voting by mail states already use, Kilgore said. With their approach, either state by state or nationally, to voter eligibility verification, Democrats would be in a far stronger position on the topic, and more in line with the large majority of Americans who support some form of voter ID. All right, that is it for what the right and left are saying, which brings us to what New Jersey writers are saying. Some New Jersey writers say the error was a predictable result of flawed policy. Others criticized former Governor Murphy for failing to shore up the issue during his term.

In Save New Jersey, Matt Rooney called the error fraud by design. For years, New Jersey's political class dismissed election integrity concerns as paranoid fantasy. They insisted every safeguard was in place. This week, reality finally caught up, Rooney wrote. Software may have failed. The company is pushing back for what it's worth, but software merely executed the system politicians deliberately built. It was the predictable consequence of it.

of a policy architecture that prioritized making registration effortless over ensuring only eligible citizens were added to the roles. The foundation was laid in 2018, when Democrats enacted automatic voter registration through the Motor Vehicle Commission. Registration became the default. One year later in 2019, they expanded driver's licenses to illegal aliens. Anyone paying attention could see the obvious question. What happens when those systems collide, Rooney said?

When government intentionally dismantle safeguards, expands eligibility for driver's licenses to people who cannot legally vote, automates voter registration, weakens accountability, and then expresses surprise when eligible people wind up on the voter rolls. The real failure isn't the software. In the New Jersey monitor, Terrence T. McDonald said, Phil Murphy gives New Jersey Democrats one more kick in the teeth. Former Governor Murphy, who ended his two terms as governor in New Jersey,

spent his final years in office stripping Democratic Party leaders of their chief ballot advantage, cozying up to Donald Trump as Trump sought re-election and attempting to install his wife as a U.S. Senator McDonald-Rood. Now, Governor Mikey Sherrill alleges that Murphy's administration dropped the ball as the State Motor Vehicle Commission accidentally registered about 6,000 non-citizens to vote. If the claim she made on Tuesday are true, Murphy not only left Cheryl with a massive mess to clean up and New Jersey with a black eye, but also made it harder for New Jersey Democrats and potentially Democrats nationwide to argue that Trump's allegations

of widespread voter fraud are wrong, McDonald said. Trump's push to convince Americans that non-citizens are flipping election results, which is really just a personal crusade to convince America he did not lose re-election in 2020, has been strengthened thanks to incompetence in our state government. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the writer's saying, which brings us to my take. Compared to how straightforward, this story seems on the surface, 6,600 non-citizens, were erroneously registered to vote in New Jersey, it's actually pretty complicated.

To recap, New Jersey allows people renewing their driver's licenses or government-issued ID cards to simultaneously register to vote if they certify that they're U.S. citizens. The state contracts part of that process to edemia, a French company that sells software to help departments of motor vehicles in the United States with everything from testing to voter registration. New Jersey Governor Mikey Sherrill said the software erroneously registered 6,600 non-citizens to vote, despite marking themselves as ineligible, allowing roughly 400 to actually cast ballots. In her announcement last week, Cheryl said these 6,600 non-citizens committed no fault, but had simply been registered to vote because of a software error. This turned the

public gaze and criticism toward ademia. Ademia's side of the story is meaningfully different. It said that all 6,600 of the individuals in question said, yes, an initial question about wanting to register to vote, but no to a subsequent one about being a U.S. citizen. This is where the details are unclear and disputed. Edemia says that the Motor Vehicles Commission erroneously included these respondents when it sent its registration to the state division of elections. In other words, it recorded the responses accurately and the state was at fault. The MVC didn't have to send an eligible voter data to the state, and New Jersey's election office could have filtered those responses out. In June of 2024, MVC requested the software to automatically mark anyone who indicated they were a non-citizen as declining to register to vote, which solved the issue going forward.

But the 6,600 erroneously added people from the year before were never removed or disclosed. When that side of the story broke on Friday, the narrative changed to something like this. The state of New Jersey incompetently used this system that resulted in 6,600 non-citizens being registered to vote, and the state was so incompetent or corrupt that this was not fixed immediately or disclosed publicly for more than two years. If you want to be really cynical, you could also argue that the non-citizens, by virtue of selecting yes, were also expressing some intent to break the law. I would not argue that, but the Trump administration is already pursuing prosecution. candidly, it's impossible to know whether without contemporaneous records and probably a court case

who was really at fault here. If you're asking me, ademia's story strikes me as far more plausible. MVC had the right data. The registration issue was fixed once they requested ademia change its settings, and the state is trying to pin blame on some vague software error. Given that ademia can point to a specific moment in time when the problem was fixed, it really seems like the software was doing what it was told to initially, it was just being told the wrong thing. In an even worse look for the state, the elections office then failed to recognize that it registered 6,600 non-citizens on its voting role. Yet, even if this is the case, I wouldn't count edemia as blameless here. Presuming their version of events is accurate, how is it possible they didn't give clear enough

instructions for something this important with a client this big? Is there no auditing or oversight? Are we really just leaving government workers a few clicks or one malform query away from meaningfully corrupting our election systems? None of that feels particularly exonerating for the private contractor in this case. Governor Cheryl, for her part, continued lambasting ademia publicly on Friday, saying the state had already begun the process to end its relationship with the vendor because this company was at the heart of the issues with New Jersey's MVC, long wait times bureaucracy, red tape. Maybe Cheryl is overreaching there, but ending the relationship is probably for the best. And it's a tough break for Cheryl, who had nothing to do with any of this. Thank you, Governor Phil Murphy, yet is now left to clean it all up. Meanwhile, the Trump administration signaled it's going to prosecute the non-citizen voters,

which doesn't feel like a just solution to me. In most cases, I'd support any non-citizen voting illegally facing criminal charges, but this situation seems unique. A non-citizen lying about their citizenship to register to vote is illegal, but a non-citizen indicating on a forum that they want to participate in elections while also making it clear that they are not a citizen, and then being told they can vote, does not strike me as the sort of thing that is worth a prosecutor's time.

If I walk into a bar and the bartender asks me if I want to drink, and I say, yes, but I'm only 20 years old, and then the bartender says, that's okay, you can drink here, then hands me a beer and I take a sip, who do we think is the person worthy of prosecution? The story is also a reminder of the reality of voter fraud. Non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare. A quick look around the country shows that most states have mere hundreds,

if not single-digit numbers of non-citizens who cast ballots among millions of registered voters. Even here, in an incident where 6,600 non-citizens were erroneously added to the voter rolls, 94% didn't actually cast the ballot. of the 6% who did, a majority possibly didn't even know they were violating the law, given how the state corresponded with them. To draw on my previous analogy, if I told you that 94% of 20-year-olds offered a beer

inside a bar, then turned the beer down, you'd probably be more worried about the socialization of 20-year-olds than you were about their capacity to commit a crime. And not for nothing, but this story seems directly related to the Trump administration effectively killing the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC. Ademia, after all, says its systems functioned perfectly well, and as proof noted that the state of New Jersey tested and approved the systems before they were implemented. The EAC was a federal agency that helped state standardize this kind of election-related software,

and this is just the kind of thing that supporters of the EAC worry will see more of with it taken off the table. All things said and done, I'm glad this mistake is finally coming to light, and that both the federal government and state governments are giving it some attention. What's critical to me is that this all reinforces the single most important element of election security, a paper trail. In this case, we got lucky. The mistake was caught using the digital tools at hand.

But what if the software system itself had been compromised? What if the error was smaller and less noticeable or at larger and more difficult to unwind? As with vote tabulators, having a paper record is our best last defense for audits and record-keeping. and as we become more and more reliant on software tools and computerized systems, we need to stay diligent about preserving the primary documents those tools or processing. All right, that is it for my take. We have a staff dissent today from our associate editor, Karina Pacheco, so I'm going to pass it over to her, and I'll be back for your questions answered.

New Jersey's voter registration scandal is messy, chiefly because each side is trying hard to twist it to fit their own narratives. But however you slice it, the state's voter registration system resulted in hundreds of illegally cast ballots, which is a serious failure. It's virtually impossible to accurately judge the intention or culpability of each non-citizen who actually cast a ballot. But in most cases, I as much agency to an individual as possible, even if I'm sympathetic to their situation.

If you live in a foreign country and receive notice that you were registered to vote, you have several ways to understand whether you can legally vote in state or federal elections. Google is probably the easiest. Separately, if the state mistakenly registered you to vote via a software glitch or other mishap and you disclose that you are a non-citizen, then you are not to blame. But I also believe if you actually cast a ballot just because you were registered to vote, you're breaking the law, even if you didn't know it. Saying these people couldn't know better assumes a very low bar of critical reasoning and denies these non-citizens of any agency.

And what precedent does it set if we let voter fraud at any scale go unpunished, especially if we definitely know it happened? I can't get behind the idea that New Jersey should just let this one slide. If we want to send a serious message about election security, all parties, the software company, the motor vehicle commission,

and the individuals who cast votes, should be held to account. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, thanks, Karina. That is it for our my take and dissent today, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Catherine in Clinton, New York. Catherine said, in the past, the sources, both pathogens and foods carrying them of deadly and sickening foodborne illnesses, have been reasonably quickly identified.

The foods were called and the people are instructed about what to avoid or how to clean, etc., the possible sources when safe. But none of those normal procedures seem to apply to the recent outbreak of cyclospiriasis. Why? I understand that it's a parasite and not bacteria, but why do we have so little information about the sources of it, what to avoid eating or handling, etc.

All right, while managing editor Ari Weissman was out on paternity leave, we had this rotation of guests that came on to our weekly talk show suspension of the rules to fill out the roster and offer their opinions on pertinent topics. Two weeks ago, the author of the newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, Dr. Caitlin Jedalina, joined the show to talk about cyclospiriasis and has discussed it in depth in her newsletter. First, what it is. Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that spreads through food or water contaminated with human feces.

An infection of cyclospora is called cyclosporiasis. It can cause explosive diarrhea for weeks, and its symptoms tend to set in more gradually than what you might experience with other illness. illnesses or food poisoning. The Centers for Disease Control may have struggled to detect the outbreak for a few reasons. First, tracing the source is slow work. Since the parasite is not part of the standard parasite panels, detecting it requires an infected person to report their condition, public health experts to find an interview that person, and then for the infected person to recount all the food they've eaten in the past 10 days. Second, reported cyclosporiasis cases have been trending up for years, making it harder to detect spikes.

that indicate an imminent outbreak. Third, the infection is not centralized and is actually clustered around four separate outbreaks with the largest spike in Michigan linked to iceberg lettuce from a supplier in Mexico distributed to Taco Bell restaurants. Lastly, federal funding.

Many outlets have reported on funding cuts to FoodNet, a federal program managed jointly by the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture to analyze trends in food-borne illnesses, linking those cuts to this current outbreak. The government's food surveillance program may not be perfect, but those cuts probably did not contribute to the CDC's delayed communications because FoodNet was not designed to prevent and respond to outbreaks. As Jedalina said in her newsletter, FoodNet was never designed for real-time outbreak detection or response.

The more accurate culprits are the lack of centralized coordination by the federal government, our siloed health systems, and insufficient capacity at state and local health departments. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. And last but not least,

our Have a Nice Day Story. Many little girls dream about what their wedding day will look like. So for their daughter, Jordan Rosenberg's wedding, to her now husband, Max Kramer, in May, Rosenberg's parents unearthed an old video of their four-year-old daughter talking about her future wedding. She told them the celebration would have a range of attractions

that you may expect a four-year-old to list off, clowns, face paint, dancing, and a moon bounce among them. When asked who her groom would be, Jordan exclaimed, Max. The kicker? Rosenberg and Kramer did not meet until college. The audio was put together as a surprise and played during the father-daughter dance, much to the guest's delight and Kramer's surprise. He couldn't believe it, Rosenberg said of her husband's reaction

to her serendipitous sentimental prediction. People has this story, and you can check it out with a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody. That's it for today's episode. As always, if we'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law, signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Keeback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.

To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.