Reuters reported Wednesday that more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens have been added to American voter rolls since 2000, across eleven states: California, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
Senator Mike Lee took to the Senate floor the same day and went off. The thing they insist never happens, he said, keeps happening over and over again. He blamed the honor system, meaning the self-attestation box where you check that you are a citizen and everyone takes your word for it.
He is right that it keeps happening. He is wrong about the mechanism, and the actual mechanism is worse.
Read the phrase "self-declared" again.
These people were not lying. That is the entire point of the word self-declared.
According to Reuters, the registrations came from software glitches and clerical errors. Its review pointed to inadvertent bureaucratic failures rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally.
Georgia's audit found the same thing. Investigators traced 2,570 flagged registrations to workers at the Department of Driver Services submitting automatic voter registration applications before citizenship was verified, and in some cases coding noncitizens as citizens outright. Some workers misclassified immigration documents as proof of citizenship.
So here is what actually happened in a great many of these cases. A person walked into a DMV, filled out a form, indicated on that form that he was not a United States citizen, and the government registered him to vote anyway.
The honor system worked fine. The honesty was there. The system took an accurate answer and produced the wrong result.
Which creates an awkward problem for the bill.
Reuters said it plainly, and Fox's write-up mentions it in passing. The finding raises questions about whether requiring proof of citizenship at registration would actually eliminate the issue.
Think it through. If a clerk is already miscoding an applicant who told the truth, adding a document requirement to the same process, staffed by the same people, running on the same software, does not obviously fix anything. You would be handing a new verification task to the exact system that just failed a simpler one.
We have said this before in these pages about rushed verification schemes, including the Texas database that flagged 2,724 registrations and had to reinstate citizens who had already proven citizenship to the state, and the Postal Service ballot portal the Supreme Court killed 7 to 2 because it was untested and the agency had no authority anyway.
Same lesson every time. Verification is only as good as the people and software executing it.
Be honest about the scale, too.
Thirty thousand sounds enormous until you put a denominator under it. That is twenty-six years across eleven states.
Georgia's audit of 8.2 million registered voters found twenty noncitizens, nine of whom had ever cast a ballot, all before verification rules adopted in 2012. Utah reviewed more than two million registrations and found essentially one. Michigan's nonpartisan auditor general found 99.99 percent of 8.3 million voter records complete and valid. New Jersey identified 6,600 self-identified noncitizens registered, of whom fewer than 400 voted.
Reuters could not determine how many of the 30,000 actually voted, and noted state data is tentative and subject to revision.
Anyone telling you this decided an election is selling something. Anyone telling you it does not matter is also selling something, because a government that cannot correctly process a form where the applicant told the truth has a problem regardless of the vote total.
The fix is boring, which is why nobody is campaigning on it.
Audit the DMV coding. That is where the errors are originating, by the states' own findings. Fix the software that converts a checked box into a registration. Retrain the clerks. Require counties to actually complete the citizenship verification step before activating a flagged registration, which Georgia's own audit found was being skipped.
None of that requires a new federal mandate, a lawsuit, or a floor fight. It requires somebody to do the unglamorous work of fixing a database.
Fifth one this month.
Ghost daycares in San Diego billing for children who were never there. A Fort Worth daycare with sixteen citations still open. An Arizona Medicaid scheme billing for dead patients. Three quarters of a million ACA enrollments the government cannot verify. And now voter rolls where the government ignored what people told it about themselves.
Different agencies, same disease. We build systems that process forms at scale, staff them thinly, automate them badly, audit them never, and then argue about whose fault it is when the output is garbage.
Nobody has to lie to break these systems.
They break fine on their own.
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