Mikie Sherrill got homework from Congress. She turned in a campaign flyer

I’ve reviewed plenty of depositions and board minutes as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, and you learn fast to spot an answer from a dodge. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) just handed Congress a masterclass in the dodge, and it took her four weeks to do it.Here’s the situation. New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission ran driver’s-license software that, between June 2023 and June 2024, transmitted voter registrations for applicants who checked the box saying they were not U.S. citizens. About 6,600 people were swept onto the rolls this way, and around 400 cast ballots. A second review has since turned up roughly 5,000 more noncitizen registrations, unrelated to the original glitch. Sherrill blames the vendor, IDEMIA. IDEMIA blames the state. Somewhere in that finger-pointing sits an uncomfortable truth: nobody in Trenton caught this for over a year.On July 24, nearly 20 House Republicans led by Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) and Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger (R-TX) sent Sherrill 12 specific questions. How did the failure happen? Were any 2023 or 2024 races close enough that 400 stray ballots could have mattered? What safeguards stop a repeat before the midterm elections? Reasonable questions any fiduciary owes a plain answer, not spin. Sherrill’s August response instead spent much of its length attacking President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, and a proposed federal citizenship-verification bill. Van Drew put it well: the letter read like she’d “embossed” a political mailer on her official letterhead. Pfluger said she devoted three pages to political theater and barely a sentence to the actual questions, including whether any close race was affected. That’s not an answer. That’s a press release with a governor’s signature.New Jersey has made some effort. Sherrill ordered an internal investigation, began purging more than 4,500 erroneous registrations, and is replacing IDEMIA as the MVC’s vendor. Legitimate first steps. But steps aren’t sunlight. Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said sunlight is the best disinfectant, and Trenton has offered intermittent fluorescent lighting at best: no public code audit, no certification timeline, no answer on whether any race turned on a margin smaller than the questionable ballots in that district.The refusal to hand the Justice Department the underlying voter data, citing the Privacy Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, is a separate fight, and a fair one on paper. A federal judge already sided with New Jersey on a related demand for its full voter database. But the privacy argument only goes so far: the IRS already has these residents’ tax records, and the Social Security Administration has had their numbers since birth. Washington, taken as a whole, already holds more data on these 6,600 people than Harmeet Dhillon asked Trenton to hand over. Sherrill is really guarding which agency looks first, not whether Washington looks at all, and that doesn’t explain why she can’t tell her own legislature, in plain English, what went wrong and when Trenton knew.This isn’t only a Jersey problem. DHS claims to have flagged over 250,000 possible noncitizen registrations across four states, though the more careful figure of 118,003 counts only raw data matches, not confirmed violations, and deserves real skepticism until verified case by case. Other states tell a smaller story: Georgia found 20 noncitizens among 8.2 million voters, Louisiana 390 in a 2025 review, with 79 who had voted going back four decades. That’s the honest range: real, small, and worth fixing without a national panic attack.SHOULD A CHURCH LOSE ITS FUNDING FOR SAYING GRACE?Which is exactly why Sherrill’s evasiveness is such an unforced error. The New Jersey numbers are containable and explainable. A straight answer would have taken the air out of the story in a week. Instead, she picked a fight with Washington and left every legitimate question on the table, which only invites the subpoenas Van Drew is now openly discussing.I tell clients in fiduciary disputes what I’d tell a governor: when caught short, the fast, boring, complete answer beats the clever one every time. Voters can smell bull excrement from across the room. Sherrill had a chance to close this out with a memo. She chose a press conference instead. New Jersey deserves better bookkeeping than that, and so does every voter whose name got tangled up in someone else’s paperwork error.Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.