SPRINGFIELD - On December 18th, the Illinois Secretary of State's office notified the Illinois State Board of Elections that a "programming error" led to well over 500 possible non-citizens mistakenly registered to vote through the Automatic Voter Registration process. Not only are these non-citizens registered to vote in Illinois, but several non-citizens may have voted in the 2018 election and previous elections. I joined State Representatives to call for answers.
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I am disappointed to see a program with such good intentions be so poorly administered. As the Republican leader on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of federal elections, I’m planning to convene a listening session where I hope to hear from the Illinois Secretary of State about how he intends to solve this error and reassure Illinois voters that non-citizens are not being registered to vote. Automatic Voter Registration has the potential to encourage more voter participation, but as we’ve seen, if it’s not carefully administered, it can have major consequences on the integrity of our elections.
This egregious error further highlights the need for states to regularly clean their registration rolls and how H.R. 1, Democrats top priority, which would federally mandate processes like Automatic Voter Registration for every state, can have serious issues for states with even less infrastructure than Illinois.
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