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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
The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumOct 02, 2019
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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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.

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"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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MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

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Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash. Unsplash+ License obtained by the author.

MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

Originally published by Independent Voter News.

Today, I am proud to share an exciting milestone in my journey as an advocate for democracy and electoral reform.

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Half-Baked Alaska

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Getty Images / Thanakorn Lappattaranan

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This past year’s elections saw a number of state ballot initiatives of great national interest, which proposed the adoption of two “unusual” election systems for state and federal offices. Pairing open nonpartisan primaries with a general election using ranked choice voting, these reforms were rejected by the citizens of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The citizens of Alaska, however, who were the first to adopt this dual system in 2020, narrowly confirmed their choice after an attempt to repeal it in November.

Ranked choice voting, used in Alaska’s general elections, allows voters to rank their candidate choices on their ballot and then has multiple rounds of voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the final vote and is declared the winner. This more representative result is guaranteed because in each round the weakest candidate is dropped, and the votes of that candidate’s supporters automatically transfer to their next highest choice. Alaska thereby became the second state after Maine to use ranked choice voting for its state and federal elections, and both have had great success in their use.

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The United States Supreme Court.

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Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

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