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Protecting War Criminals Is As American as Apple Pie

In this week’s Elie v. US, our justice correspondent bemoans our long failure to prosecute war criminals. Plus: the death of Nolan wells and the nightmare so many Black parents fear.

New Jersey made a mistake. Well, more accurately, software used by New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles made a mistake. The state learned this week that a computer malfunction at the DMV led to approximately 6,600 individuals who indicated that they were not US citizens being registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. Around 400 of these people who were registered incorrectly voted in a New Jersey election.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill apologized for the error, which occurred before she was in office. She released a statement expressing how seriously she takes the problem and assuring the public that the glitch has been fixed and the registrations revoked.

You can imagine how this all went over with the Trump administration. Even before this revelation, the Republican National Committee was working to subpoena voter registration records in New Jersey as part of their endless fishing expedition for alleged voter fraud. That request was soundly rejected in court. But we can expect the RNC to try again based on this DMV error.

And they’ll be joined by the Trump Department of Justice. The DOJ has now requested the full names, addresses, and voter information of the noncitizens incorrectly registered in New Jersey. There’s no reason for the DOJ to have this data; if anything, the DOJ should be investigating the software company that produced the error, not harassing the people who answered truthfully and were accidently registered anyway.

But something worse than harassment will probably happen to the nearly 400 noncitizens who voted. The DOJ will come down on them like a hammer and, most likely, attempt to detain and deport them.

Since nobody in power in the Democratic Party will have the courage to say this, I will stand on a hill and shout that 400 people voting illegally doesn’t matter. Approximately 6,600 people accidentally being registered doesn’t matter.

New Jersey has 6,682,699 registered voters. The DMV error meant that 0.0988 percent of those voters shouldn’t have been registered. In the 2024 presidential election, 4,272,725 people cast a ballot in New Jersey. If 400 people did vote illegally, that works out to 0.00936 percent of total ballots cast.

This error is negligible. It had no effect—and unlike Governor Sherrill, I don’t take it seriously. Caring about this is like caring that somebody is going (pulls out the calculator) 55.005148 miles per hour in a 55mph zone. This entire “issue” is stupid.

Trump’s army of election deniers took all the big prizes in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week. Andy Biggs won the GOP primary for governor. That’s the same Andy Biggs who, as a representative in the House, voted against counting his own state’s electoral votes in 2020. Meanwhile, Alex Kolodin won the primary for secretary of state. Kolodin is a longtime election denier who helped file the “Kraken” lawsuit after the 2020 election. Let us hope voters in Arizona actually want their votes counted.

In May, a federal judge ruled that ICE has no authority to make immigration arrests inside New York City immigration courts. ICE has made at least six arrests inside Manhattan courthouses since being explicitly told it couldn’t.

Workers who say they were laid off from Meta based on metrics gathered by AI were denied a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the company from firing them. The judge ruled that the workers suffered no “immediate harm” because they can always sue after they’ve been fired if their terminations were legally bogus. I’m starting to wonder if all federal judges were just the kids in middle school who got right up in your face and shouted, “I’m not touching you.........

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