California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), already under fire for excessively long lines, told Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Wednesday that it made key errors in 23,000 voter registrations filed under the state’s 2017 “motor voter” law.
In 2015, AB 60 went into effect, granting over one million illegal aliens in the Golden State the ability to apply for driver’s licenses without having their immigration status reported to federal authorities. In 2017, AB 1461, the “motor voter” law, automatically registered Californians to vote when they applied for driver’s licenses unless they were ineligible. State officials reassured the public that non-citizens would not be allowed to register to vote because database safeguards would prevent it.
The 23,000 errant applications did not include any illegal aliens, the DMV says. However, there were other crucial errors, including registering people who had opted out of registration, and registering some people with the wrong party preference.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The errors, which were discovered more than a month ago, happened when DMV employees did not clear their computer screens between customer appointments. That caused some voter information from the previous appointment, such as language preference or a request to vote by mail, to be “inadvertently merged” into the file of the next customer, Shiomoto and Tong wrote. The incorrect registration form was then sent to state elections officials, who used it to update California’s voter registration database.
A small number of the mistakes — officials estimated around 1,600 — involved people who did not intend to register to vote. State officials said no people in the country illegally — who are eligible to get a special driver’s license in California — were mistakenly registered to vote. An unknown number of errors included voters whose political party preferences were changed without their consent. Officials did not provide additional details about the errors they uncovered during a monthlong investigation.
The Associated Press reports that the state will inform voters whose details were entered incorrectly so that they can make corrections. The 23,000 flawed registrations represent a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million who have registered or updated their registrations from the beginning of 2017 through August 5, 2018.
Republican businessman John Cox, who is running against Democrat Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom for governor, has made reforming the DMV a key pledge of his campaign.
California is a key battleground in the 2018 elections, where Democrats are targeting seven Republican-held congressional seats. A few votes in each could sway the overall national result and bring back House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as Speaker of the House.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.