Nevada's Automatic Voter Registration Has the Same Weak Spot as New Jersey's
A computer glitch let non-citizens vote in New Jersey. And Nevada might have the exact same weak spot.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced this week that a software error at the state's Motor Vehicle Commission registered roughly 6,600 people to vote even though they'd checked “no” when asked if they were U.S. citizens.
The error happened between June 2023 and June 2024, before Sherrill took office.
Here's the part that should stop you cold.
These folks answered the citizenship question honestly on a keypad while applying for a driver's license or ID card. The system registered them to vote anyway.
Not because they lied. Because the software failed.
A preliminary review found almost 400 of them actually cast ballots. They were spread across Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, scattered all over the state.
Sherrill, to her credit, didn't try to bury it. She said she found out about the flaw last week and immediately ordered her chief counsel to investigate.
She said her team is removing everyone wrongly registered and replacing the vendor responsible for the system.
“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen,” she said.
Good for her. Now here's why Nevada folks should care.
Nevada runs its own version of the same system. Question 5, passed by voters in 2018, created Automatic Voter Registration through the DMV.
Fill out paperwork for a license or ID, and unless you opt out, your information gets sent straight to the Secretary of State's office to register you to vote.
It's all software. It's all automated. And software breaks.
This isn't hypothetical anymore.
The same week Sherrill made her announcement, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to election officials in New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania and Nevada, saying preliminary federal reviews turned up more than 250,000 potential non-citizen registrations across those four states combined.
Nevada's share of that number was 15,903.
Mullin's letter said the comparison matched voter data against federal immigration records on name, birth date, address and Social Security number.
“Election security is national security,” he said.
So New Jersey isn't some isolated fluke. It's a warning label on a system Nevada uses too.
Now, plenty of folks on the left will tell you non-citizen voting basically never happens and worrying about it is a conspiracy theory.
New Jersey's governor just proved that argument wrong with her own press conference. The system can fail. It did fail.
And nobody would know unless someone went looking!
That's the real lesson here.
Automated government systems sound modern and efficient, right up until they quietly hand a ballot to somebody who isn't supposed to have one.
New Jersey only caught this because somebody finally checked the code.
Nevada's Secretary of State owes voters the same kind of check, not a press release insisting everything is fine.
Fifteen thousand potential problem registrations is not a rounding error. It's a reason to open the hood and look.
Nevada voters deserve elections where every ballot cast belongs to someone who's legally allowed to cast it. That shouldn't be a partisan ask. It should be the bare minimum.
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