Culling voters

Good morning!

Gov. Mikie Sherrill said yesterday that 4,500 of the 6,600 people her administration identified as noncitizens who were registered to vote via the Motor Vehicle Commission are getting removed from voter rolls.

The names of the remaining roughly 2,100 will be sent to county election officials for review.

“We are taking this extra step because our initial review indicates that a number of these individuals may be citizens,” she said. “That has been the case in other states where clerical and administrative voter registration errors have occurred, and we’re determined to get this right.”

Sherrill has been at the center of controversy for a week since she announced that noncitizens were added to the voter rolls in 2023, and she and the Trump administration continue to spar over whether she should hand over personal information about those voters.

The Trump admin told a federal judge Tuesday that the revelations out of New Jersey strengthen its bid to get unredacted voter roll info out of the state. Sherrill so far has refused to do so.

“The state cannot simultaneously admit that 100s of federal crimes have been committed by noncitizen voters who appeared on NJ’s voter rolls and deny that the AG has a basis to investigate proper maintenance of those rolls under” federal law, the administration told the judge.

Read more from Nikita Biryukov.

Prisons: A state prison inmate is suing the New Jersey Department of Corrections to block it from forcing prisoners to surrender personal electronic tablets they purchased to message people on the outside and access digital content. This comes after Dana DiFilippo reported recently that state prisons chose a new vendor to handle the communications needs of inmates.

D.C.: Rep. Analilia Mejia, a Democrat elected in April to fill a House vacancy in the 11th District, has been in office now for 100 days. She has signed up for a number of progressive Dem bills, like Medicare for All and revamping the U.S. Supreme Court, and told Sophie Nieto-Muñoz she was surprised to learn how little Congress as a body cares about everyday issues. “One would think that in such a space, there would be more discussion, there would be a genuine debate on issues that are of such importance, like the lives of American people we send abroad to fight in wars or how affordable housing, healthcare, gasoline is for everyday American families,” she said. “It’s been jarring to see that it’s not.”

Jersey City: The clown car that is the Jersey City school board made an idiotic decision in May to have a member of the public arrested for getting too rowdy during a board meeting, but the defiant trespass charge facing the woman was dismissed by a judge Tuesday, per John Heinis at Hudson County View. “(Emily) Pecot has been a tireless advocate on behalf of children with disabilities in Jersey City. She should be applauded for that, but instead she was punished by the government. Instead of protecting the rights of protecting people with disabilities, they choose to shoot the messenger,” the woman’s lawyer said.

Immigration: Historic levels of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border and Biden administration policies led the number of undocumented immigrants in the nation to rise to 15.8 million by mid-2024, its highest level ever, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute says. The population had been hovering at 11 million since 2010.

Trump: Via Jacob Fischler, “A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the federal government can continue implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting vote-by-mail, reaching the opposite conclusion that another appeals panel decided over the weekend.”