NJ's Voter Registration Snafu

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Happy Friday, everybody. On today's show, we'll talk about the Odyssey as part of our occasional series that we call Context and a Movie. We'll match a film critic with a classics professor to talk about Homer's original, Christopher Nolan's blockbuster adaptation, and a little bit about the right-wing backlash the movie is getting. Did you hear all that Elon Musk stuff and some other things? We'll also have New York City's small business services commissioner to take your questions and complaints about red tape. Mayor Mamdani says they're attacking it in a new way. We'll invite you to put your red tape questions to his commissioner for that.
We'll look at the complicated relationship between the rising DSA and some long-time black and Latino leaders in the city who are concerned about a new kind of marginalization. But first, we're at the intersection of the New Jersey Motor Vehicles Department and the National Politics of Voter Registration. On Tuesday, you've probably heard this, Governor Mikie Sherrill announced that a software issue at DMV accidentally registered about 6,000 non-citizens to vote, fewer than 10 percent of them or around 400 actually did. She says there's no evidence of this glitch affecting the outcome of any election in the state. But the revelation comes just as President Trump and the Republican Party generally are looking for new ways to make voter registration and actually casting ballots harder for the midterms. They say it's in the name of preventing voter fraud, despite the lack of evidence of anything major like that, and of course, the history of Trump's claims about his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 But something did happen in New Jersey.
State Republicans now say it's bigger than what the Democratic Governor revealed and they want to roll back the state's so-called Motor Voter Law that automatically registered citizens, supposed to be just citizens, through their contact with the DMV, and the law that allows non-citizen immigrants to get driver's licenses. With us now, WNYC and Gothamist, New Jersey reporter Mike Hayes, and Liza Weisberg, a supervising attorney at the ACLU of New Jersey, where she focuses on democracy and voting rights. Hi Mike, and by the way, is it Liza or Liza?

**Liza Weisberg** (2:26)
It's Liza. You got it right.

**Mike Hayes** (2:28)
Hi Brian.

**Liza Weisberg** (2:29)
Thank you so much.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:29)
And thanks for coming on.

**Mike Hayes** (2:31)
Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:31)
Welcome to WNYC. Hey Mike. Liza, I want to start with a New Jersey Globe article you were quoted in back in April about the Trump administration suing New Jersey to turn over all its voter registration data. As an ACLU lawyer, you were obviously opposed to that.
So is the state. But give us the context. What kind of data did the Trump administration ask for? And what did Governor Sherrill and the state do?

**Liza Weisberg** (2:59)
Yeah. So the Department of Justice has asked New Jersey and a number of states all across the country to turn over its unredacted voter files. So New Jersey is perfectly willing to share its voter file with the federal government and the government has access to it. It just insists on protecting the privacy of its voters and complying with federal and state privacy laws by redacting certain highly sensitive personal identifying information like driver's licenses and partial social security numbers that are in those voter rolls. And so that's the aspect that the Department of Justice has taken issue with. And now every single court to hear these types of cases all around the country has rejected the DOJ's demand for these unredacted voter files. So, so far that's 16 courts, 16 federal district courts and one federal circuit court.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:03)
Unredacted means it would include voter's names, addresses, dates of birth, in some cases partial driver's licenses or social security numbers, according to that article. But what's the risk to those people that you would argue exists? How could the federal government hypothetically use that personal information to harm innocent people?

**Liza Weisberg** (4:22)
Yeah, well, there's a lot of evidence in the public record that what the federal government is trying to do with that data is to use really unreliable tools and data matching and aggregation techniques to pour over states' voter files to try to sort of further their immigration enforcement policy objectives, right? They want to share these lists with agencies like DHS to go after voters that they have villainized.
And we know that when these kinds of programs are used, there are tons of positives. And so there's a real risk that voters would be disenfranchised through this type of process. And so we represent voters in this case, we're interveners in the case. We represent voters who are afraid that if the government gets their hands on their personal identifying information, they will be wrongly accused of improperly voting or registering to vote, even though they are eligible, and that the federal government will sort of take retaliatory action against them or otherwise invade their privacy and voting rights.