TRENTON, New Jersey — Governor Mikie Sherrill will appoint Shirley U. Emehelu, a former federal and state prosecutor who currently serves as New Jersey's acting secretary of state, as the state's fifth lieutenant governor, the New Jersey Globe confirmed on Friday, November 6. The appointment is expected to be announced on Monday, November 9 — the same day the state constitution's 45-day deadline to fill the vacancy expires. The governor's office declined to comment on or confirm the pick.
Source: New Jersey Globe, Nov. 6, 2026
The path cleared on Friday itself. Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson of Trenton — the chair of the Legislative Black Caucus and the Assembly Education Committee, and the other finalist for the job — withdrew her name from consideration, in an announcement made by Sherrill on Friday, the Jersey Vindicator reported. Another serious candidate, Assemblyman Chigozie Onyema of Newark, had withdrawn a few weeks earlier. Sherrill's final short list had also included former Associate White House Counsel Justin Dews and Bergen County Sheriff Anthony Cureton, and at one point two outsiders: former Apprentice winner Randal Pinkett and attorney and businessman Squire Servance, who ran for Congress earlier this year.
Source: Jersey Vindicator, Nov. 6, 2026
Why the seat is empty: the Caldwell resignation
The lieutenant governor's office has been vacant since September 25, when the Rev. Dale Caldwell resigned — a day after Sherrill demanded his departure. An investigative report released on September 24 substantiated three violations: a sexual remark to a female staff member, unpaid admission for personal guests at ticketed events, and efforts to secure a promotion for a state employee Caldwell was dating, ROI-NJ reported. The New Jersey Globe summarised the findings as substantiated allegations that he sexually harassed a female staffer and violated state ethics rules. Caldwell had held both the lieutenant governor and secretary of state posts — in New Jersey, the lieutenant governor also serves as secretary of state.
Sherrill said in September that she would not name an acting lieutenant governor and would use the full 45-day process. She accepted Caldwell's resignation that Friday afternoon and named Emehelu — then the acting state comptroller — as acting secretary of state, putting her in charge of administering the November 3 general election. “She has the judgment to run these elections and the strength to stand up to Trump's attacks on voting,” Sherrill said of Emehelu at the time, in a period when the secretary of state's office was already under scrutiny after the state revealed that around 6,600 noncitizens had mistakenly been registered to vote under the previous administration.
Source: Daily Princetonian, Sept. 25, 2026
The prosecutor Sherrill has trusted for a decade
Emehelu, 48, of Montclair, is a longtime friend of Sherrill's — the two worked together as federal prosecutors — and has not been actively involved in partisan politics, the Globe noted. From 2010 to 2019 she was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, serving as chief of asset recovery and anti-money laundering, overseeing federal asset forfeiture, money-laundering and victim-restitution programs, and prosecuting complex financial fraud, as well as working in the criminal and special prosecutions division on major financial-crimes and public-corruption cases. Before that she practised white-collar criminal defence and government investigations at Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi, where she co-chaired the banking and finance group, and from 2004 to 2010 she was an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton.
She entered state government in 2022 as executive assistant attorney general — the third-highest-ranking official in the New Jersey Attorney General's Office — appointed by Attorney General Matt Platkin during Governor Phil Murphy's second term, and late last year she was on the short list of candidates for attorney general itself. She joined the Sherrill administration in January as acting state comptroller — acting, the Jersey Vindicator noted, because the Senate had not confirmed her — and in September stepped into the secretary of state's office. The New Jersey Department of State's own biography confirms the arc: acting secretary of state, previously acting state comptroller, and before that two years as executive assistant attorney general.
Source: New Jersey Department of State — About the Secretary
The appointment needs no Senate confirmation. Emehelu will stand next in the line of succession behind a governor widely considered to have national political ambitions, and will serve as acting governor whenever Sherrill leaves the state. Because New Jersey's lieutenant governor also serves as secretary of state, the appointment would also settle — permanently, not in an acting capacity — who runs the office that oversees elections, business filings and state records: the office Emehelu has run on an acting basis since September 25, through the November 3 general election.
From Nigeria to Trenton
Emehelu was born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United States at age three. Both of her parents were physicians: the family initially lived in Chicago, where her father was a surgical resident and her mother completed family-medicine training, and moved to Pittsburgh five years later. She is a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School, clerked for U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer in the Eastern District of Virginia, and later taught as an adjunct professor at Montclair State University. She is married to Ike Emehelu, a fellow Yale Law graduate who heads the projects and energy-transition practice at the international law firm Akin. Her paternal grandfather, Dr. Fabian Anene Ositadimma Udekwu, became one of the pioneers of open-heart surgery in Africa.
When the appointment is announced, New Jersey will for the first time have women serving as both governor and lieutenant governor — only the fifth state to do so, the Globe reported; New York and New Mexico will join the list in January. For New Jersey's large immigrant communities — including one of America's biggest Punjabi and Sikh populations, centred on Edison, Jersey City and the Route 1 corridor — the pick also puts a fellow immigrant one step from the governor's office, in charge of the department that handles elections and the state's front-door paperwork for businesses.
What happens next
The formal announcement is expected on Monday, November 9, against a hard constitutional deadline: the vacancy must be filled within 45 days of Caldwell's September 25 resignation, and Monday is day 45. No Senate confirmation is required, so Emehelu would take office on appointment — as the state's fifth lieutenant governor, succeeding Caldwell, and as its secretary of state in her own right rather than as an acting official. Sherrill is then expected to nominate a new state comptroller, the post Emehelu first held in this administration. The governor's office had not confirmed the appointment as of Friday evening; this report is based on the New Jersey Globe's confirmed reporting, the Jersey Vindicator's account of the Reynolds-Jackson withdrawal, and state and contemporaneous records of Emehelu's and Caldwell's service.