Jeff Van Drew has found the issue he wants to run on. New Jersey mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote, and Van Drew — who chairs the House Judiciary Committee's oversight subcommittee — plans fall hearings and told POLITICO he is "absolutely exploring" the use of congressional subpoenas.

He sent Gov. Mikie Sherrill a letter with 12 questions and a deadline of August 21. If the answers don't come, he says, subpoenas are on the table.

There's a detail buried in that same story that changes how the whole thing reads.

He voted for the law that created the problem

The mistaken registrations trace back to New Jersey's 2018 "motor voter" law. That law let people applying for a driver's license or state ID register to vote automatically. Noncitizens are supposed to be screened out of that process. During a stretch in 2023 and 2024, they weren't.

In 2018, Jeff Van Drew was a Democrat in the New Jersey state Senate. He voted for that bill.

Asked about it by POLITICO, he said he has no regrets, and put the blame on the agency running the system: "How was I to assume that the agency would break the law?"

That's a convenient standard. When a program he voted for fails, the failure belongs to the bureaucrats. When it's time to investigate that failure, the investigation belongs to him.

What actually happened, according to the state

The facts as the governor's office has laid them out are narrower than the outrage suggests:

• About 6,600 noncitizens were added to the rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 — more than a year before Sherrill took office.
• Around 400 of them cast ballots in later elections.
• Sherrill has said she does not believe any of those ballots swayed an election.
• Responsibility is still disputed. State officials and the France-based vendor IDEMIA are each pointing at the other.

Sherrill has also commissioned an independent outside review, which is not yet finished. New Jersey legislative Democrats have said they want to see that review before acting. Van Drew isn't waiting for it.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has demanded that New Jersey hand over names, addresses, and other records on those individuals. Sherrill has been cool to that: "We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government."

Asked about deporting people, he left the door open

Top Trump administration officials have floated prosecuting or deporting the noncitizens who cast ballots. POLITICO asked Van Drew where he stands. He didn't rule it out:

"It depends on the case, and what the intent was."

He went on to wonder aloud how many of the registered or voting noncitizens "possibly could have been felons or criminals," and concluded, "We don't know. There's some homework to be done."

That's the shape of it: an admitted absence of evidence, paired with a public suggestion that criminals might be involved. He is the one who would do the homework, and he is talking about consequences before he's done it.

Why he is the wrong man to lead this

Van Drew is not a neutral referee arriving at a question about election administration. He has a documented record of trying to overturn an election result he didn't like.

• He signed onto the Supreme Court amicus brief asking the justices to throw out millions of votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and hand the 2020 election to Trump.
• In a December 2020 op-ed, he announced he'd vote against certifying the election, calling it "a rejection of the status quo and a no confidence vote in the politicians, corporate special interests, and legacy media establishment."
• Hours after the Capitol was attacked, he voted to reject Biden's Electoral College win — the only member of New Jersey's entire congressional delegation to do so. POLITICO noted that fact in its story too.
• He then voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, against an independent bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, and against the House select committee that eventually did.

A member who voted to discard the certified votes of four states is now the one deciding what an "election integrity" investigation looks like. Whatever this inquiry produces, that history is going to be attached to it.

It's also worth remembering how he handles claims that turn out to be shaky. In 2024, during a stretch of unexplained drone sightings, Van Drew claimed Iran had parked a "drone mothership" off the New Jersey coast. The Pentagon publicly disputed it.

What his constituents actually asked him about

Here's the other thing about Van Drew's sudden appetite for hearings and subpoenas: his constituents have been trying to get his attention on something else entirely.

He refuses to hold in-person town halls, saying they just draw "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you." In March 2025, an estimated 600 people lined Tilton Road outside his Northfield office asking him to protect Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. His office was closed.

They had reason to show up. Van Drew voted for Trump's budget bill, and the Joint Economic Committee projects 30,460 people in his district will lose health coverage as a result. More than 36,000 households in NJ-02 rely on SNAP for groceries, and he voted for the largest SNAP cut in history.

No hearings on any of that. No subpoenas. No town hall.

The bottom line

Roughly 400 improper ballots, in elections nobody claims were changed by them, caused by a registration system Jeff Van Drew himself voted to create — and his response is fall hearings, a subpoena threat, and an open door on deportations.

Thirty thousand of his own constituents are losing health coverage because of a vote he cast last year. That one he's in no hurry to investigate. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by POLITICO: Jeff Van Drew says he's 'absolutely exploring' subpoenas in NJ noncitizen voter fiasco by Joey Fox (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP).