https://capitolnewsillinois.co...f-non-citizen-voting

House Republicans seek probe of non-citizen voting

State election officials confirm as many as 16 who identified as not being U.S. citizens voted in 2018-19

By PETER HANCOCK
Capitol News Illinois
phancock@capitolnewsillinois.com
Tuesday, January 21, 2020

SPRINGFIELD — Republican lawmakers in Illinois are demanding answers from Secretary of State Jesse White about how 545 self-identified non-U.S. citizens were mistakenly registered to vote through the state’s new automatic registration system, including 16 who actually cast ballots in 2018 and 2019.

In a letter to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan, five Republicans who serve on the House Executive Committee called the erroneous registrations, “a serious breach of supposed protections put in place to ensure the integrity of our voter rolls in the State of Illinois.”

“This is an absurd lack of compliance with state law, surfacing less than three weeks from the opening of early voting for our state’s 2020 general primary election,” the Republicans wrote. “Given this, we are requesting an immediate hearing of the House Executive Committee to investigate this situation and to hear testimony directly from Secretary of State Jesse White, officials of the State Board of Elections, representatives from our local election authorities, and others concerned with this situation.”

The letter was signed by Reps. Tim Butler, of Springfield; Keith Wheeler, of Oswego; Joe Sosnowski, of Rockford; Grant Wehrli, of Naperville; and Ryan Spain, of Peoria.

In addition, all 19 Republican senators signed a letter directly addressed to White asking, among other things, what assurances he can provide that such an error won’t happen again.

Madigan’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But Democratic Sen. Andy Manar, of Bunker Hill, issued a statement Tuesday saying he might call for Senate hearings.

“There is absolutely no room for administrative ineptitude when it comes to properly conducting our election system,” Manar said. “Democrats and Republicans came together and unanimously approved automatic voter registration, and we expect it to be done correctly...If it takes a Senate committee hearing to get those answers, that’s the course I’ll pursue.”

In 2017, Illinois lawmakers unanimously passed Senate Bill 1933, which provides for automatic voter registration whenever someone applies for or renews a driver’s license. Under that system, the secretary of state’s office shares a database with the State Board of Elections so driver’s license officials can immediately tell if an applicant is already registered.

If they are not, they are asked whether they want to be registered. If they say yes and they have checked a box indicating they are a U.S. citizen, their information is automatically forwarded to the State Board of Elections.

But in a Dec. 18, 2019, letter to the board, White’s office said information from 574 people who self-identified as being non-citizens was mistakenly included in a batch of data transferred to the board. That information was then forwarded to local election officials to finalize their registrations.

State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich said in an email that of the 574 people who checked “no” on the driver’s license application citizenship question, 545 became registered anyway — a small fraction of the more than 7.9 million registered voters in Illinois.

White’s office said all of those individuals were lawfully present in the United States. The issue did not involve any undocumented immigrants applying for a temporary visitor driver’s license.

Since they became registered, Dietrich said, 19 ballots have been cast by 16 individual voters who were improperly registered: 10 in the 2018 general election; one in the 2019 consolidated primary; and eight in the 2019 consolidated general election. Those votes occurred in Champaign, Christian, Cook, DuPage, Lee, Macon and Peoria counties and the city of Chicago. One improperly-registered voter in Chicago cast ballots in all three elections.

He added that it was not certain all 16 actually were non-citizens. “They may have checked that box in error,” he said in an email.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the races or ballot issues they voted in were close enough for their votes to have changed the outcome.

The automatic voter registration system launched on July 2, 2018. According to the secretary of state’s office, a computer programming error in that system caused people who checked “no” on the citizenship question to be included in nightly batches of voter registration applications sent to the State Board of Elections.

That programming glitch wasn’t discovered until Dec. 13, 2019, and was immediately corrected, the secretary of state’s office said. That office is now working with local election officials to remove their names from voter rolls. It is also sending letters to those individuals advising them of the mistake and admonishing them not to vote.

I didn't read the whole article but if they believe it's just 16 they are more inept/corrupt than anyone thought possible.

How many times did each one vote?

16?
A whole 16 people?


https://www.chicagotribune.com...j3lx4bggu-story.html

This little "oopsie" is up to 500.

(I hate this place)

Admitting to a small transgression in the hope that the large transgression will be overlooked.

Illinois says............LOLOLOLOLOL! Yeah, you can trust Illinois.

Outrage shopping at its finest.

Only the Democrat party says that certain minorities are too stupid to get a photo ID. Would they say it makes it harder to cheat? Of course not.

Me thinks someone was using this “new math” whilst attempting to derive the figure.

Last year, Texas A.G. Ken Paxton released a report stating 95,000 illegal aliens were registered to vote, with 58,000 actually voting in Texas elections.

https://www.texasattorneygener...-dps-non-us-citizens

Methinks they dropped a few zeroes.

They must mean 16 per minute.

But who did they vote for? /sarcasm

So let’s now count the dead people, criminally insane, those who are in a vegetative state.

The voters of Illinois hold the sanctity of elections very dear, I hear the dead are very upset about this news.

Add 3 zeros after the 16. Now that’s more believable.

During the Larry Elder show tonight a nurse called in, stated that she was a nurse in an Alzheimer patient facility, and witnessed Democrat activists come into the unit and harvest absentee ballots from the patients...so, yeah, voter fraud is going on.

https://www.sj-r.com/news/2020...-registration-system

Policy change: Secretary of state won’t forward 16-year-olds’ info to voter registration system

By Jerry Nowicki, Capitol News Illinois
Posted Jan 30, 2020 at 6:24 PM
Updated Jan 30, 2020 at 6:24 PM

SPRINGFIELD – While the information for approximately 4,700 16-year-olds was forwarded from the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office to the Illinois State Board of Elections as part of an automatic voter registration program, no underage people were registered to vote, nor did they receive information about registering to vote, according to representatives of those two agencies.

“To be clear, no 16-year-olds were registered to vote,” Henry Haupt, deputy press secretary for the secretary of state’s office said in a phone call Thursday. “In fact, the election authorities throughout the state have long had a system in place preventing them from registering anyone under age to vote.”

Automatic voter registration became law in 2017, providing that Illinois citizens are automatically registered to vote whenever they apply for or renew a driver’s license unless they opt out. Under that system, the secretary of state’s office shares a database with the state elections board.

The transmission of 16-year-olds’ information through that system was an issue of policy and not related to a previous glitch in the voter registration system which allowed 545 self-identified non-citizens to register to vote, according to officials.

Haupt said even though the secretary of state shared the information of 16-year-olds, they did so knowing they would not be allowed to vote if they did not reach the necessary age by the date of the next election.

In Illinois, a person who is 17 years old is allowed to vote in primary elections as long as they will turn 18 by the date of the general election.

Haupt said after recent discussions with ISBE, the secretary of state will change its current policy.

“We went ahead and met with ISBE and we will no longer be sending 16-year-old registration information,” Haupt said. “Now we’re just not even going to send them that information. We’re going to cut that out. We’ll just start sending it when they’re 17 years or older.”

Matt Dietrich, the ISBE public information officer, said in a phone call the agency noticed a large number of applications for 16-year-olds coming through the automatic registration system even though they were clearly not of age to vote. But Dietrich said no 16-year-old got any further in the registration process than applying for a driver’s license at the secretary of state’s office.

“They were never registered to vote, they were never even forwarded to the local election authorities,” he said.

Still, because the information was forwarded by the secretary of state, ISBE sent letters to all whose information was received, telling them their voter registration had been blocked.

“We had noticed that we were getting a lot of these applications coming through and we block those automatically,” Dietrich said. “Those never went on to the local jurisdictions. No 16-year-old was ever registered to vote. And we were sending letters to the applicants that basically said ... ‘you’re too young, we recently received the application. However, under Illinois law and so forth and so on.’”

He said the 4,700 number is approximate because, “this never became part of our record keeping, because we weren’t even supposed to see them.”

Dietrich said the issue came up at the ISBE meeting this week when board members said underage persons should not even be given the chance to start the AVR process when applying for a license.

He said while he initially believed the applications were being received as part of a glitch, the secretary of state’s office clarified that their sharing of the information was intentional.

“They are no longer going to send them to us and we are no longer going to have to send out letters,” he said.

Haupt also noted the secretary of state’s office was looking into why some legally eligible U.S. citizens who opted out of registration were registered to vote anyway through the program.

“Hopefully we’ll have more information by the end of the day,” he said.

In response to the existing non-citizen registration, news reports of the 16-year-olds being moved through the registration system and those that opted out of the system being registered, Senate Republican Leader Bill Brady called for a suspension of the automatic voter registration system Thursday.

“We are asking that you suspend this program until all “glitches” known and unknown are fixed,” Brady said in a letter to the secretary of state that was co-signed by the entire Senate Republican caucus.