Jury Duty Records Could Help Clean Up Voter Rolls, GOP Lawmakers Say

TRENTON, N.J. – Assembly Republicans are renewing their push for legislation requiring New Jersey election officials to compare the state's voter registration database with jury duty records after reports that roughly 75,000 noncitizens are excused from jury service each year because they are not U.S. citizens.

The renewed call comes days after the Sherrill administration disclosed that about 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered to vote through the Motor Vehicle Commission's automatic voter registration system between June 2023 and June 2024.

First introduced by Assemblyman Robert Auth in 2018, the bill (A509) would require the Secretary of State to enter into an agreement with the Administrative Office of the Courts to compare the statewide voter registration system with jury records identifying people who were excused from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens.

Under the bill, those records would be reviewed to identify people who are ineligible to vote under state law and remove them from the voter rolls where appropriate. The legislation would require the comparison to include all available jury records dating back to New Jersey's 1994 “motor voter” law, which allows residents to register to vote when obtaining a driver's license.

Auth said the state has had the information needed to identify ineligible registrations for years but has failed to use it.

“Eight years ago, I introduced this bill because the state was already sitting on the solution," Auth (R-Bergen) said. "Every year, tens of thousands of people tell the Judiciary they are not U.S. citizens. The state simply never bothered to compare that list with the voter rolls. If this had been enacted in 2018, we could have prevented years of bad registrations instead of discovering the problem after thousands of ineligible voters had already been added to the system.”

Assemblyman Greg McGuckin, a co-sponsor of the legislation, said the latest disclosures suggest the problem extends beyond a single software error.

“The administration wants New Jerseyans to believe this begins and ends with one vendor's glitch," McGuckin (R-Ocean) said. “It doesn't. The same bad records putting noncitizens on the voter rolls are putting them into jury pools. That's not one mistake.

That's a systemic failure. The Judiciary has the records. The Secretary of State has the voter file. Matching the two is common sense, and the Legislature should have done it years ago.”

The legislation is also sponsored by Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia and co-sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Inganamort.

According to the Administrative Office of the Courts, New Jersey issues more than 1 million jury summonses each year using records from the Division of Elections, the Division of Taxation and the Motor Vehicle Commission.

About 20% of prospective jurors report they do not meet one or more statutory qualifications, and roughly one-quarter of those disqualifications — about 75,000 annually over the last three years — are based on noncitizenship.

The lawmakers said the same records already used to protect the integrity of the jury system should also be used to protect the integrity of New Jersey elections.

“The state already trusts these records enough to keep ineligible people out of the jury box,” Auth said. “It should trust them enough to keep ineligible people off the voter rolls.”