Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told Newsmax on Thursday that the Justice Department is treating New Jersey's noncitizen voting issue as a "very serious matter" after demanding records on about 6,600 noncitizens who were improperly registered to vote.

Dhillon appeared on "Finnerty" after Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said her administration would not comply with the DOJ's request for records, including information on roughly 400 noncitizens who cast ballots.

The demand is tied to the department's lawsuit seeking New Jersey's statewide voter file under the 1960 Civil Rights Act.

According to the Homeland Security Department, as many as 35,152 potential noncitizens could be on New Jersey's voter rolls.

Sherrill disclosed this week that Motor Vehicle Commission software added applicants who had explicitly identified themselves as noncitizens.

Dhillon said the registrants "raised their hands" while obtaining driver's licenses and should not have been registered to vote. She accused the state of going "mum" after DHS identified the registrations.

"This is not just a blue-state problem," she said, listing West Virginia and Utah among roughly 30 states resisting federal voter-data requests. She accused states of "gaslighting their citizens."

She dismissed Sherrill's attribution of the error to state software vendor IDEMIA, which is being replaced by Telos.

It is "not the job of the software vendor to verify citizenship," Dhillon said, noting that Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, a Democrat, is also secretary of state. "The vendor just transmits the data, so blaming them is a cop-out."

Dhillon said the DOJ is pursuing the roughly 400 who voted and that "there are hundreds of thousands" of noncitizen registrants identified in a handful of other states through commercial data. 

Prior administrations haven't "gone hard on the voters who vote illegally," she said, adding that the current Trump administration DOJ is prosecuting cases and "there are many more in the pipeline."

Dhillon said she has notified all federal election officials that knowingly allowing noncitizens to vote is a federal crime, and said officials will be "very interested to know what they knew and when they knew it" in New Jersey.

"We're not calling it a glitch or an error or a mistake," she said.

The Justice Department has lost 16 consecutive federal court rulings in its effort to obtain statewide voter files, with judges finding the Civil Rights Act of 1960 does not give it that authority.

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