New Jersey state Sen. Kristin Corrado was wrapping up a meeting with healthcare providers in a conference room at her office in Totowa when her phone started “blowing up,” she said. It was July 21, and Corrado's fellow Republican legislators, as well as her own staff in Trenton, wanted to know if the senator was watching Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s surprise press conference.
“Have you seen this? You need to see what's going on. They just admitted that there's non-citizens on our voter rolls,” Corrado recalled them saying.
Sherrill’s announcement rippled out of the state capitol like an earthquake. As many as 6,600 noncitizens had been accidentally registered to vote in New Jersey, with around 400 casting ballots illegally in various elections. At fault was a "software error" in the Motor Vehicle Commission’s software that automatically registers people to vote when they apply for a driver's license or a state ID, Sherrill said.
It was the kind of proof of so-called voter fraud that many Republicans had been searching for. President Donald Trump weighed in, inflating the numbers to say “thousands and thousands” of illegal votes were cast in New Jersey. His Department of Justice demanded the state turn over its voter rolls.
But for Corrado, Sherrill’s revelation was more personal. Corrado had worked her way up through the ranks of local politics, first as a Passaic County clerk overseeing elections then as a state senator. Years before the error was made public, she’d repeatedly raised concerns with New Jersey’s Democratic leadership, which had long pushed for automatic voter registration, about the Motor Vehicle Commission’s technology and its ability to distinguish between citizens and those who weren’t eligible to vote.
Corrado said she was “totally dismissed.”
Now, she and other state Republicans hope they can push the state Legislature to take bold action when lawmakers return from summer break next month, with an agenda that is likely to collide with the priorities of Democrats who have firm supermajorities in both chambers. At a bare minimum, Republicans want a temporary moratorium on automatic voter registration at the Motor Vehicle Commission until the conclusion of an independent investigation into the voting error that Sherrill launched last month.
“At this point I think the public generally would say, ‘Oh, yeah, well, since it didn't work, let's stop doing it for a while.’” Republican state Sen. John Bramnick said.
But some members of the state GOP are thinking bigger, like a permanent ban on automatic voter registration, the establishment of a special committee with subpoena power to get to the bottom of what happened during the Murphy administration when the problems arose and even what is arguably the holy grail of conservative election law: a law that would require voters to present valid IDs before they can cast ballots. In the wake of the voter registration scandal, Sherrill has hinted she might support the idea.
“We have to be realistic about our numbers right now,” Corrado said, acknowledging that Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state Senate 25-15. “But I am always open and willing to have the conversation [with Democrats] and see what we can work on together.”
Senate Democratic leader Nicholas Scutari’s office did not respond when asked if he’s open to a moratorium or holding hearings. Democratic Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin’s office also did not provide answers. His office sent a weeks-old statement commending Sherrill for her response.
‘What didn’t work’
Corrado, 61, is a bona fide lifer when it comes to New Jersey elections and Republican politics. She remembers getting dressed up at age 6 to go with her father — her “hero” and law partner of roughly 25 years — to swear in newly elected local officials at the start of the year. In her teens, she knocked on doors on behalf of candidates running on the Republican ticket. And when she became an attorney, she would work the polls on Election Day and assist with recounts if necessary.
“I did it all,” Corrado said.
Her first election as a candidate was in 2010. She ran for Passaic County clerk and won, spending more than seven years in the county courthouse in Paterson working among handwritten records and maps dating back to the 1600s. In that job, Corrado oversaw the vote-by-mail process, certified elections and counted the results on election night.
“I learned a lot in that role about what worked, what didn't work,” she said.
New Jersey state Sen. Sen. Kristin Corrado
In 2017, Corrado was appointed to fill a seat in the state Senate vacated by Kevin O’Toole, who resigned to become Port Authority commissioner. She came into the job roughly six months before Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law making New Jersey the 12th state to authorize automatic voter registrations.
Over the next few years, Corrado wrote six letters to the Secretary of State’s office raising concerns about the practice. In an April 30, 2021 letter to then-Secretary Tahesha Way — sent the day before undocumented immigrants became eligible to get driver’s licenses in the state — Corrado warned that the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission's "repeated failures" to “manage technology assets and computer systems” questioned the agency’s ability to register “only eligible persons.”
After watching Sherrill’s press conference, Corrado quickly issued a statement expressing her frustration with being ignored.
“I sent SIX separate letters raising concerns and calling for action AND introduced legislation that would have provided a commonsense safeguard by preventing the MVC from prompting noncitizens to register to vote but my warnings were repeatedly ignored by the Democrats,” the statement read. “Now we are learning that a catastrophic government failure allowed thousands of noncitizens to be registered to vote, and suddenly everyone is acting surprised.”
‘No regrets at all’
State Sen. Benjie Wimberly, a Democrat from Paterson, took a completely opposite view on the state’s ability to seamlessly deliver automatic voter registration when he signed on as one of the legislation's primary sponsors in 2018 and helped push it through the state Legislature to then-Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk.
“I was confident that technology was in place not to have this type of glitch. But it happens,” he told Gothamist.
Wimberly, 61, is another lifer in New Jersey elections, but from the other side of the aisle as Corrado. He said he took part in get-out-the-vote efforts as young as 10 years old and that his grandfather, a contemporary of civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, used to offer him and his cousins a “salary” of a kosher hot dog and a Dr. Brown’s soda for knocking on doors and doing voter outreach around Paterson.
“That was one of our big treats to get out and get flyers and stuff out,” he said. “So we didn't make money, but he fed us well.”
Wimberly was elected to the state Senate last year after serving in the Assembly since 2011 and has sponsored a number of bills to expand voter access and turnout, including the automatic voter registration legislation.
Wimberly said he has “no regrets at all” about the measure, despite noncitizens being registered to vote, and he dismissed the idea of pausing the program, implementing voter ID requirements and other ideas Republican lawmakers have put forth.
“Anything that increases voter turnout, when it comes to the GOP, they don't want it,” he said. “That's not a coincidence. They want a low voter turnout.”
New Jersey state Sen. Benjie Wimberly
Not only do Democrats and progressive advocates not want to see automatic voter registration go away, they also want it expanded to places like the Department of Corrections and Human Services.
“The idea of automatic voter registration is that when eligible voters are interacting with state agencies and they're providing all of the information that they need to be registered, that they should be registered,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of the Brennan Center's Voting Rights and Elections Program.
“We're somewhere close to half of the states having automatic voter registration, which is another indication that's not the problem here,” said Morales-Doyle, who has worked on automatic voter registration campaigns across the country. “ While no system can be perfect, we actually do have a really high-functioning set of election officials and election administration in this country.”
Corrado opposes the idea of expanding automatic registration. “Absolutely not. No, I would not support that,” she said.
Voter ID?
Sherrill floated the idea of supporting a voter ID bill eight days after news broke that noncitizens had been registered to vote and that some had indeed voted. It blindsided her Democratic colleagues.
“ I don't support that at all," Wimberly said. "I would be totally against any type of voter ID bill because I think that, once again, would suppress the vote. To look at voter identification as part of it, then we become part of these other red states of really voter intimidation and suppression.”
Seven social justice organizations sent Sherrill a joint letter “unequivocally rejecting the notion of voter ID laws in New Jersey.” Nuzhat Chowdhury, director of democracy and justice at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, one of the organizations behind the letter, reiterated she was “disappointed” to hear the governor indicate she could support more stringent voter ID.
“It would not have changed the particularities of this situation [at the Motor Vehicle Commission] at all,” she said. “Extra voter ID laws would not have flagged or fixed the software issue that occurred.”
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill
Sherrill and her staff have not specified what type of voter ID law the governor supports — other than to say she maintains she’s vehemently against President Donald Trump’s SAVE Act. Her administration did not respond to questions about whether she’d support a moratorium or further investigation by the Legislature.
“The governor has directed a thorough, complete, and expeditious investigation, and that is exactly what is underway. CSG, a bipartisan firm, is conducting an independent investigation, and we will release the findings when its work is complete,” Sherrill spokesperson Darwin Phan said in a statement. “Republicans can try to use this issue to advance their voter suppression agenda, but the governor is focused on accountability, protecting the voting rights of eligible New Jerseyans, and fixing the problem created under the prior administration.”
But naturally, Corrado saw Sherrill’s comments about voter ID requirements as an opening.
“We look forward to working with her on that and getting that passed,” she said.
Not all Republicans are this optimistic. Bramnick doesn’t put a lot of stock in Sherrill’s comment about being open to voter ID.
“I think Mikie Sherrill said she'd sign it because she knows there's probably no chance it's ever coming on her desk,” he said.
