California Voter Registration Concerns
In October of 2015, California enacted a law (AB 1461) that required the Department of Motor Vehicles to forward records for eligible applicants to the Secretary of State’s Office for registration unless those applicants elected not to register to vote. The law was well intended and aimed to reduce the leg work on behalf of the applicants to become registered voters.
Previously, in January of 2015, California passed AB 60, which made illegal aliens eligible for a special use California driver’s license.
This is a special driver's license that:
- May NOT be used for identification purposes.
- MAY be used to drive anywhere throughout the state of California.
- Has a distinguishing feature and notice on the front of the license indicating that it is for driving purposes only, per the AB-60 law (i.e. “DP" instead of “DL").
- Cannot be used against the license holder to determine their immigration status or citizenship or detain them in any way for reasons other than valid traffic violations.
Assuming illegal aliens have the Table A or Table B documents required to obtain a California DP license (Eligibility Requirements can be found here), it could be argued that illegal aliens would not necessarily be inclined to seek a California DL. The verbiage of AB 1461 would tend to indicate that recipients of the DP would not be eligible applicants for referral to the Secretary of State’s Office for voter registration. That presupposition assumes that all illegal aliens, having already broken federal immigration law to enter the United States illegally, would honor California state law and only apply for the DP license.
Of special interest, however, is one of the Table A Proof of Identity Documents for DP eligibility, “a previously issued California driver's license or identification card (October 2000 or later).” This proof of eligibility statement seems to indicate, at least to some degree, that the state of California is aware that some number of illegal aliens would be in possession of valid California driver’s licenses.
Critics argue that AB 1461 allows California to register illegal aliens to vote. It is not true that California explicitly passed a law to allow illegal aliens voting rights, though I am not sure that is the actual criticism levied against AB 1461. If, as the Table A Proof of Identity Documents for DP eligibility seems to indicate, some illegal aliens were in possession of valid California driver’s licenses prior to passage of AB 60, there would be room for concern that illegal aliens would likely be able to obtain valid California state driver’s licenses after the passage of AB 60. This becomes a greater issue after the passage of AB 1461, where the individual obtaining the license would be automatically registered to vote.
A California driver’s license requires proof of US citizenship in the form of a US Birth Certificate or Passport and a Social Security Number. If illegal aliens were to provide false or stolen data to obtain a driver’s license, they would be registered to vote in California.
How widespread illegal alien voter registration and voting is remains a mystery. Fact checkers often site the lack of data as proof of no illegal voting. Critics often argue that the fact that illegal alien voter registration and voting can happen means that it is happening in great numbers. States are responsible for maintaining their voter registration and validating voter eligibility. Nearly every state has ineligible persons on their voter registrations, whether they be deceased persons, people who have moved to a new state, or otherwise ineligible. The states have not been very proactive in purging their voter registration rolls or validating voter eligibility, which does provide opportunities for voter fraud. At this time, however, there has not been a comprehensive study conducted to find out the scope of the problem.
In July of 2017, more than 20 states refused to share data with a federal voter fraud commission established by President Trump. It’s difficult to determine whether any data coming out of a commission looking into something as politically charged as voter fraud would have been deemed credible, but it is safe to say that politics certainly disrupted an attempt to at least gather the data, which could have been analyzed by any of a number of partisan and nonpartisan groups.
