Katy Grimes:
“…In January we learned that the Department of Motor Vehicles and county voter registrars told the California Secretary of State Alex Padillalast year that the motor Voter program was not ready. Motor Voter automatically registers voters when they renew or obtain a drivers license. The DMV and registrars asked Secretary Padilla to hold off on the roll-out. But Padilla and the state went ahead anyway.
The new system had not been properly checked, according to the county voter registrars. They had valid concerns, said Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno). “The people of California are suffering with the DMV and it’s 1980’s technology,” Patterson said.
California’s Motor Voter program has been plagued with problems since its rollout in April 2018. The Department has admitted mishandling voter registration information for 23,000 drivers and double-registering as many as 77,000 others. In addition to this, as many as 1,500 ineligible voters were registered by the DMV – including an unknown number of non-citizens. Also, over 500 Californians may not have been able to vote in the November 2018 election because the DMV did not send their information to the Secretary of State’s office in time.
Patterson said his office is still getting reports from constituents whose Party registration was changed after a visit to the DMV. “This is how ballot harvesting is happening,” Patterson said.
Patterson is a member of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, and has been pushing for a bipartisan audit of the DMV, including the Motor Voter Program. Assemblyman Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield) and Patterson made the bipartisan request to audit the DMV Motor Voter Program of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee at a special hearing in May.
Last week Democrats on the JLAC committee declined to authorize an audit, despite concerns of voter fraud within the Motor Voter program. In addition to registering illegal aliens to vote, “a number of families with 16-year-olds are getting registered to vote – not just pre-registered, as legislated,” Assemblyman Patterson said in an interview with California Globe…”
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