US DOJ says NC’s DMV registered noncitizens to vote
That’s right.
Raleigh politicians and their sycophantic dictationists in the dwindling Capitol press corps have been demanding reforms at the DMV to cut wait times. THIS revelation, however, seems to be a hell of a lot more important:
A Hispanic woman living in Charlotte didn’t know why a police officer and federal investigator showed up at her doorstep earlier this year to ask her questions about a voter registration she didn’t know she had.
In partnership with QC Life’s Jorge Andrés, WBTV Investigates visited her home and spoke to the woman in Spanish to understand why her name had appeared in a federal prosecutor’s letter to the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles.
“She had no idea until they reached out to her,” Andres said after speaking with the woman about the registration.
The woman is legally in the United States, is not accused of any crime, and told WBTV she had no knowledge at the time of what happened. For her protection and at her request, WBTV is not identifying the woman
She is one of six noncitizens that U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson is accusing the DMV of illegally registering to vote. In nearly all the cases, according to records obtained by WBTV, it did not appear to investigators that the people registered had any knowledge of what had happened.
According to online voter records, none of them used their registration to vote.
“She did say she was surprised and she wanted to fix the errors,” Andres said of the woman’s conversation with investigators. “She said that it was an investigator that led the correction of the error.”
US attorney accuses DMV of voter registration errors
Russ Ferguson, appointed in March by Attorney General Pam Bondi to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, first alerted the DMV in July that his office had learned of several noncitizens registered to vote.
“We have encountered a number of ineligible individuals who have registered to vote at the DMV but have no knowledge of doing so,” Ferguson wrote in the letter obtained by WBTV.
“Consistently, they report they were simply presented a form to sign by a DMV employee. That form is presented in English, even though many of these individuals do not speak sufficient English. Most of them recalled signing an electronic block at the DMV, but believed it was part of the process to obtain a driver’s license.”
In a separate letter, Ferguson provided several names and asked the DMV to investigate how the registrations had happened.
DMV said ‘no systemic issues’ uncovered after investigation
In response to the letter, DMV Commissioner Paul Tine – who declined through a spokesperson to interview for this story – told Ferguson that the agency had investigated and had not uncovered any systemic issues in their processes.
In some of the cases, a DMV examiner had incorrectly marked the applicant as a U.S. citizen, Tine wrote.
Other cases, he said, were a “system error.” In some cases, the DMV corrected the error in their systems, but the registration had already been sent to a county board to finish processing. […]
I can almost hear the laser printers pumping out the releases blaming this on Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, and Jeff Jackson. The problem with that strategy? DMV’s involvement in the voter registration game has long been based in federal law:
[…] At the heart of the issue identified by Ferguson is the box on a voter registration form that asks a person to verify that they are a U.S. citizen. That box was sometimes incorrectly checked by a DMV examiner, Tine said, or in other cases incorrectly selected by the person.
“We take our role in the voter registration process seriously and will continue to assist the State Board of Elections in meeting their mission,” a DMV spokesperson told WBTV.
US attorney, DMV clash on whether issues are sign of systemic problem
In follow-up letters over the ensuing months, Ferguson and Tine have clashed on whether the registration errors identified are part of a larger problem.
“Although your letter claims your investigation ‘did not reveal any systemic issues,’ you found issues with all five voters in the limited sample I identified,” Ferguson wrote in September. In that letter, he also identified a sixth name that had come to his attention that he asked the DMV to investigate.
“You say two of those issues were due to ‘examiner oversight,’ but it appears all five issues could have been avoided by [DMV] examiner attention.”
In Tine’s most recent response, dated Oct. 28, he maintained that numerous systems are in place that safeguard the vast majority of people registering to vote.
“The small number of erroneous voter registrations that your office has identified supports the notion that the DMV’s standard protocols are effective,” Tine wrote. “While the ideal number of erroneous voter registrations would, of course, be zero, six out of the millions of applications the DMV has processed is an exceedingly low error rate.”
In that letter, Tine also outlined several steps the DMV would take to ensure similar errors didn’t happen in the future, including enhanced training for examiners.
Separate efforts already underway at the DMV to hire more examiners and modernize outdated software would also help eliminate errors in the future, Tine wrote.
NCSBE demands Social Security numbers in response
The controversy has led to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, where executive director Sam Hayes is now pressing the DMV to share full social security numbers with his agency so they can crosscheck voter rolls for noncitizens registered incorrectly.
“We don’t have those here,” Hayes said in an interview with WBTV. “To the extent we’ve collected any, we have only collected the last four.”
When pressed on whether there would be privacy concerns with a state agency possessing complete social security numbers that normally does not collect them, Hayes pointed to numerous other government agencies that collect and retain Social Security numbers.
“I’m not about the business of just giving out my [personally identifiable information] either,” Hayes said. “But they should understand that government agencies use this data all the time for things like voter list maintenance.”
The DMV has not provided those numbers yet, a spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections confirmed in November.
“That would greatly improve our efforts at voter list maintenance here and would go a long way to making sure that we don’t have non-citizens on our voter rolls,” Hayes said.
In Tine’s most recent letter to Ferguson, he said the DMV was exploring whether they could lawfully share that information with the State Board of Elections.
Personal implications of registration errors
For the members of the Hispanic community caught up in the controversy, their goals are to cooperate and correct the problems.
WBTV attempted to reach the people named and successfully contacted two of them.
A young man also named in Ferguson’s letter told WBTV over the phone that the DMV had never contacted him about the error. His local board of elections reached out recently, he said, and helped him get it fixed.
Ferguson said in a statement that he did not plan to criminally prosecute the people involved.
“They had no criminal intent and were victims of a failed DMV system,” a spokesperson for Ferguson said. “The U.S Attorney is more focused on fixing the problem at the DMV than prosecuting individuals working at the DMV but will continue to track these issues.” […]
Really? We’re apparently talking about checking a box that asks “Are you a US citizen?” . The applicant either said YES or NO. If they said YES, and the answer was really NO, then we have a huge problem. If a DMV employee was told NO and marked YES, we have a problem.
We need to find out how many people have been improperly registered over the years. Sure, they’ve uncovered six here. But could there be 600 or 6000 or even 60,000 out there who have been processed since the NVRA went into effect three decades ago?
Let’s also not forget the multiple voter registrations tied to the Charlotte commuter train slasher. Just think about how much mischief can be conducted with multiple incorrect voter registrations out there AND NO VOTER ID REQUIREMENT. José or Maria may not realize he or she was registered to vote. But that doesn’t guarantee someone didn’t vote under José or Maria’s names.
I’m not ready to rule out prosecutions. Ferguson shouldn’t be either. Not before we determine just how large and long-term this problem is or has been. Give Mr. Hayes what he needs to get this fully investigated and corrected.
