State picked Thales to replace MVC’s license-system vendor on lowest price in May. The governor’s voter-roll statements still don’t name it.

A June 11 Treasury decision names Thales DIS USA as the State’s pick to replace IDEMIA’s MVC driver-license system, the system tied to New Jersey’s voter-registration errors. The bid was issued in January 2025, a year before Gov. Mikie Sherrill took office. The new bid also says MVC and the Division of Elections, not the vendor, “will provide all verbiage and workflows” for the signature-pad screens where customers answer voter-registration questions.

TRENTON — New Jersey had already chosen a company to replace the vendor behind its Motor Vehicle Commission driver-license system weeks before Gov. Mikie Sherrill told the public about thousands of improper voter registrations tied to that system. A state record names the company. The Governor’s statements don’t.

The company is Thales DIS USA, Inc. It is named in a June 11, 2026 final agency decision by the Department of the Treasury’s Division of Purchase and Property (DPP). The decision rejected a protest by the incumbent vendor, IDEMIA Civil Identity NA LLC, and upheld the State’s plan to award the contract to Thales.

What the Treasury decision says

The decision, signed by Chief Hearing Officer Cory K. Kestner, lays out the timeline of Bid Solicitation #25DPP01124, “T2466 Enhanced Digital Driver’s License (EDDL) and Central Issuance”:

• Jan. 15, 2025: DPP’s Procurement Bureau “issued the Bid Solicitation on behalf of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC),” seeking a cloud-based EDDL system. (The State’s NJSTART posting lists the solicitation as available Feb. 11, 2025.)
• Oct. 29, 2025: Three quotes were opened. The quote deadline had been pushed back repeatedly through bid amendments, according to NJSTART.
• By May 12, 2026: An eight-member evaluation committee, six of them from MVC, scored the quotes. The Bureau asked IDEMIA and Thales for best and final offers. The committee’s report is dated May 12, 2026.
• May 19, 2026: The Bureau recommended a Blanket P.O. award to Thales and issued a Notice of Intent to Award.
• June 3, 2026: IDEMIA protested. Among other things, it argued that Thales’s sample credentials showed grayscale portraits.
• June 11, 2026: DPP rejected the protest and sustained the award.

The decision quotes the evaluation committee’s reasoning: “Thales was technically responsive, showcase the necessary experience and comprehension of the requirements specified in the Bid Solicitation and has the capability to execute the Scope of Work. Additionally, Thales submitted the lowest overall pricing.”

The NJSTART posting lists a contract period of Jan. 31, 2026, to Jan. 30, 2033. Neither the decision nor the posting states a dollar value, and Jersey Intel has not seen an executed contract.

What the Governor has said

The bid was issued under Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration. Sherrill took office in January 2026.

In her July 21 statement, Sherrill said a “serious software error” had registered roughly 6,600 people who answered “no” to the citizenship question between June 2023 and June 2024. She said she had ordered her chief counsel to investigate, and that “The new MVC Administrator that I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for administering the system.”

By then, according to the Treasury decision, the replacement had been chosen in May and had survived IDEMIA’s protest in June.

Her July 28 statement updated the voter-roll cleanup and did not mention a vendor. Her Oct. 7 release named IDEMIA in connection with the error and said that “In addition to transitioning to a new vendor, the MVC is in the process of implementing agency-wide reforms.” None of the three statements names Thales.

Who writes the voter-registration screens?

MVC customers register to vote on a signature pad during license and ID transactions. The new bid includes a section titled “Voter Registration and Organ Donor Requirements” (Section 4.3.1). It says:

“The ICA must provide a signature pad-based registration system for voter and organ donor designations… NJMVC and Division of Elections (DOE) will provide all verbiage and workflows for the signature pad logic.“

It adds that MVC “requires that workflows and verbiage be easily editable and configurable at the MVC’s request and require little to zero programming effort from the Contractor.”

That language is in the new bid, written in 2025. It does not show who wrote the questions, wording or logic used in IDEMIA’s system from June 2023 to June 2024, when the State says the errors occurred. That depends on IDEMIA’s original contract and on the State’s own instructions to the company, and Jersey Intel has not seen either.

The question matters because the Governor’s Oct. 7 release calls the problem “the IDEMIA system error.” Whether the State also supplied the wording and logic under the old contract is a question the records requests below are meant to answer.

The new bid also says any move from “the incumbent to another Contractor must be seamless with no interruption of daily operations,” and that MVC expects a phased rollout with “temporary interfaces with existing EDDL systems.” The documents don’t say whether IDEMIA’s system will still handle MVC voter registrations through the Nov. 3 election.

What Jersey Intel is requesting

Jersey Intel is preparing Open Public Records Act requests for:

• Treasury (DPP): the evaluation and recommendation reports, the executed Thales contract and price sheet, the best-and-final-offer records, and the incumbent IDEMIA contract;
• MVC: the IDEMIA contract and amendments, any change orders to the voter-registration prompts since June 2023, any breach or cure notices sent to IDEMIA, and payment records;
• Division of Elections: every version of the signature-pad voter-registration wording and workflow the Division provided or approved since June 2023, and its data-exchange agreement with MVC.

The Governor’s investigation, opened in July, has not published findings.