Hold the hypocrisy on voting rights
Yes, motor-voter snafu should be investigated, but let’s also halt more widespread practice of removing legal voters from rolls
Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White is in hot water over a glitch in the state’s motor-voter program. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox and Ameya Pawar
Republicans and Democrats are up in arms over a glitch in the state’s motor-voter program.
Passed with unanimous bipartisan support by the General Assembly in 2017 (after former Gov. Rauner vetoed it the year before) and having taken effect in July 2018, the Automatic Voter Registration program attempts to enroll Illinois voters when they get their driver’s license — simple, easy, one-stop shopping. But it came to light this week that 574 non-citizens had their information mistakenly forwarded from the Secretary of State’s Office to the State Board of Elections and were erroneously enrolled as voters.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that, according to Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich, “since then, 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.”
Yes, that is troubling, and it strikes at the sanctity of our elections — the foundation of our democracy. But let’s look at it in context with the total number of Illinois voters: 7.9 million.
It’s a minuscule problem, but just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s not serious. No illegal vote should be cast in any U.S. election. We can all agree on that.
There needs to be an investigation into Secretary of State Jesse White and how these names slipped through the cracks to be forwarded to the Board of Elections — even as those drivers checked a box saying, “No,” they’re not citizens eligible to vote.
Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax reported Wednesday that White was “getting heat from all sides.” State Sen. Andy Manar of Bunker Hill immediately called for a probe, issuing a statement saying, “There is absolutely no room for administrative ineptitude when it comes to properly conducting our election system. 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.”
Hannah Meisel of The Daily Line reported that grassroots groups that originally supported the motor-voter initiative were among the most outraged this week, because they felt betrayed after working to pass a common-sense law that nevertheless cost them substantial political capital. They were justifiably unsparing in criticism of White’s office. “Let’s be clear: Automatic Voter Registration or AVR isn’t the problem — the Secretary of State’s office is the problem,” the Just Democracy Coalition said in a statement. “The agency’s massively delayed and error-riddled implementation of AVR has undermined the law’s intended purpose to make Illinois’s voting rolls more fair, accurate, and secure — a mission shared by lawmakers of both parties who passed AVR on a bipartisan and unanimous basis in 2017.”
Immigration groups, already on the front lines in their ongoing battle with President Trump, felt additionally betrayed. Meisel reported that “Lawrence Benito, the CEO and executive director of Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights — a key member of the coalition that pushed for automatic voter registration — characterized the Secretary of State’s Office’s actions as a ‘careless and needless set of circumstances has put so many of our neighbors at risk.’”
“The Secretary of State’s Office has largely declined to take up our repeated offers to improve AVR implementation through direct assistance, community forums, and outside expertise,” Benito said in a statement.
Republicans, who tend to resist initiatives easing voter registration in other states (and ask yourself why that’s the case), were also rightfully offended. Illinois GOP Chairman Timothy Schneider called it “simply unacceptable,” issuing a statement saying, “The secretary of state’s failure to competently administer the Automatic Voter Registration process in Illinois compromises the integrity of our entire election system.
“Mistakes are made,” Schneider granted, “but when it comes to voting, it simply is inexcusable that non-citizens voted in Illinois and potentially affected the outcome of elections across the state. Those in the Secretary of State’s Office who allowed this to happen should be terminated from their employment with the state. Public hearings in the General Assembly should commence immediately, and the AVR program should be temporarily suspended until we get answers.
“Voting is a right and a privilege reserved only for U.S. citizens. The American people need to know that their government is upholding, not undermining, that right.”
To which we can only add: stop clutching your pearls, Republicans. It’s not as if you’re so lily white on voting rights.
“The problem of one person, one vote, with everyone entitled to vote able to vote, cuts both ways. It’s not just about preventing illegals from voting. It’s also about protecting voting rights for everyone eligible. It’s about people who should be allowed to vote freely casting their votes, and not being targeted for removal by organizations because of the way they look or how much money they make or what candidate they’re projected, rightly or wrongly, to vote for.”
The motor-voter snafu is a problem, and there needs to be an investigation into what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. But any time you legitimately expand access to voting, there are things that potentially can go wrong and should be fixed. And, to be clear, there is a larger and deeper history in the United States of purging voters, of imposing poll taxes — of generally depriving targeted groups of the electorate of their natural right to vote — and that should get equal attention because it’s still happening today.
You think 19 ballots cast over three separate elections might have had an impact on a race? What about the 670,000 Georgia voters purged from rolls by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, before he narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by 55,000 in the 2018 governor’s race? What about Florida voters approving a measure allowing felons the right to vote — only to have the state legislature add new requirements that they also pay back all court-imposed fines and fees before they can cast a ballot, a position recently affirmed by the state’s supreme court over objections that it amounts to a poll tax?
What about a Wisconsin judge’s recent ruling demanding that 150,000 voters or more be removed from election rolls, a decision still deadlocked in the state’s evenly balanced Elections Commission, with three Republicans voting to remove the voters and three Democrats voting against, even as the Associated Press reported that “the affected voters are in heavily Democratic areas of Wisconsin, a battleground state in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin in 2016.”
These are all problems when it comes to fair, legal, valid elections, and they demand equal attention.
The problem of one person, one vote, with everyone entitled to vote able to vote, cuts both ways. It’s not just about preventing illegals from voting. It’s also about protecting voting rights for everyone eligible. It’s about people who should be allowed to vote freely casting their votes, and not being targeted for removal by organizations because of the way they look or how much money they make or what candidate they’re projected, rightly or wrongly, to vote for.
Then there’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky repeatedly blocking votes to ensure nationwide election security, until some funding for that was grudgingly slipped into a spending bill at the end of last year. Consider, U.S. intelligence determined that Russians interfered in the 2016 election in an attempt to benefit Donald Trump, Illinois election rolls were actually hacked by Russians in that election, the FBI’s Robert Mueller testified before Congress just last summer that those Russian efforts are ongoing, yet McConnell has led Senate Republicans in denying action to prevent it from happening again.
Groups like Breitbart are going to use those 19 ballots cast mistakenly in Illinois to demonize minority and nationalized immigrant voters as a group nationwide, but when it comes to protecting the integrity of our elections from foreign interference Republicans won’t go along because they’re the ones who stand to benefit? Come on.
Which brings us, yes, to gerrymandering. Granted, it’s not right for politicians to select their voters and not the other way around, but it’s also not a problem unique to Illinois. Across the nation, far more Republican state governments are tilting the legislatures in their favor than is the case with Democrats. That’s a simple fact. So if something is to be done about gerrymandering — and it should be — it should be done at the national level. It can’t just be blue states that agree to play fairly by the rules while red states flaunt them. Voting rights have to be fairly administered for everyone across the country.
That’s our position. Deny voting rights to those ineligible — that’s a given, and a relatively small problem at that, all things considered — but let’s also protect voting rights for those who qualify, and without making valid U.S. citizens leap hurdles put in their way by politicians trying to deny them access to the ballot box.