Saturday, 21 December 2024

State’s DMV Registered Hundreds Of Non-Citizens To Vote


Oregon officials acknowledged the state registered more than 300 non-citizens to vote since 2021.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), it happened after “lawmakers passed a bill allowing people to obtain drivers licenses in the state without proving citizenship.”

“The Oregon DMV has admitted to registering at least hundreds of non-citizens to vote since at least 2021 due to errors in its auto voter registration system. Additionally, every registered voter is sent ballots by mail. The audit is still ongoing and more illegal registrations are expected to be found,” Andy Ngo wrote.

“The @OregonSOS defends the auto voter registration system. The DMV said before that it was impossible for noncitizens to be registered in its system. Meanwhile, leftists and liberals responding to the revelation say the numbers are so small out of 3m registered voters that it doesn’t matter and shouldn’t matter anyway. Others argue for noncitizens to be given voting rights,” he added.

OPB reports:

And state officials could not say Friday how much larger that number — 306 — might grow in coming days, as the DMV continues to look at people it’s registered to vote automatically via the state’s Motor Voter Law.

“It’s moving along very quickly. We’re throwing a lot of resource at looking at this,” Amy Joyce, the state’s DMV administrator, said in a call with reporters. “But I can’t tell you right now where we are in the process.”

Just two of the people identified so far have actually voted, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said in a release Friday.

Voting as a noncitizen is a crime in Oregon, but elections officials said Friday they would look into whether the people in question had become citizens before they voted.

From the Associated Press:

The mistake occurred in part because Oregon has allowed non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses since 2019, and the DMV automatically registers most people to vote when they obtain a license or ID, Glenn said.

“It’s basically a data entry issue,” Glenn said, explaining that when a DMV worker enters information about a person applying for a driver’s license or state ID, they can incorrectly code that the person has a U.S. birth certificate or passport when they don’t.

DMV Administrator Amy Joyce told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Friday that the office is checking for additional errors and will likely find more instances of registering non-citizens to vote.

Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said Friday in a statement that the 306 people involved “will be notified by mail that they will not receive a ballot unless they demonstrate that they are eligible to vote.”

WATCH:


Source link