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GOP lawsuit says California voter registration is porous to non-citizens

California Department of Motor Vehicles

California is one of 16 states that automatically registers people to vote when they conduct business with state agencies like the DMV.

Justine Sullivan/Getty Images

California's automatic voter registration system is violating federal law by not verifying the citizenship of applicants, a Republican attorney alleges in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court.

The suit challenges a system that's meant to boost civic engagement by adding eligible people to the rolls whenever they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles. So-called AVR is also in place in 15 other states and congressional Democrats are all behind legislation to make it the national standard.

But the system in the nation's most populous state has faced several problems since its implementation in April 2018, most of which California officials have ascribed to technology failures. Six ineligible people voted in the June congressional primaries and two of them went on to vote in the November midterm. And the DMV reported it made 105,000 registration errors between the launch and Election Day.

The suit, filed by attorney Harmeet Dhillon on behalf of a group of Republican voters, wants to compel the DMV to provide election administrators with more records that can prove citizenship and eligibility.


"We want the secretary of state to do his job, which is to ensure that only eligible voters are placed on the voter rolls," she told the Sacramento Bee.

"This is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to bring their voter suppression playbook to California," Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, replied in a statement.

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Independent Voters Just Got Power in Nevada – if the Governor Lets It Happen

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Independent Voters Just Got Power in Nevada – if the Governor Lets It Happen

CARSON CITY, NEV. - A surprise last-minute bill to open primary elections to Nevada’s largest voting bloc, registered unaffiliated voters, moved quickly through the state legislature and was approved by a majority of lawmakers on the last day of the legislative session Monday.

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SDI Productions

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In 2004, there were 120,000 independent voters in New Mexico. A little over 10 years later, when the first open primary bill was introduced, that number had more than doubled. That bill never even got a hearing. But today the number of independents in New Mexico and across the country is too big to ignore. Independents are the largest group of voters in ten states and the second-largest in most others. That’s putting tremendous pressure on a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.

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Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

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