SPRINGFIELD - New reporting from the Daily Line reveals that roughly 4,700 sixteen-year-olds were automatically registered to vote by the Secretary of State’s office. Only when caught by the State Board of Elections were they removed. This is in addition to 297 individuals who opted out of the Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) program but were registered to vote anyways.

Last week, ILGOP Chairman Tim Schneider led the call for suspending the Automatic Voter Registration program in light of hundreds of non-citizens being automatically registered to vote and more than a dozen actually voting in 2018.

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Today, Chairman Schneider released the following statement renewing his call to suspend AVR:

“Shut it down. Shut it down now until we know the entire scope of the Secretary of State’s failures in implementing the AVR program. The fundamental right to vote and the sanctity of our democracy is too important to bury our heads in the sand and trust that Illinois’ state government has everything under control when it clearly does not. We must suspend the AVR program until a full investigation and audit have been performed and measures have been put into place to make sure this never happens again.”

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