August 17, 2004

"Md. Elections Officials Vow To Purge Noncitizen Voters From Rolls"

It may be, of course, too late:

Maryland elections officials, alerted this week that a greater number of people who aren't American citizens may be voting than previously thought, ordered their staff to find ways to purge the rolls of illegal voters.

"There appears to be a resignation that noncitizens are indeed on the list. That's not acceptable," said Gilles Burger, chairman of the state Board of Elections. "We want to remove all names of people not eligible to vote."

...The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the Motor-Voter law, requires that everyone who applies for a driver's license be given a chance to register to vote. The paperwork warns that noncitizens who register to vote can be prosecuted, but the act provides no method for elections workers to make sure new voters have citizenship status, elections officials and experts say...

Burger said he was "shocked" to learn that the rolls include noncitizens, although it's something local elections supervisors acknowledge and say is difficult to prevent. They say there's no way to know how many immigrants may be voting illegally.

"We take for granted," that new voters are truthful when they say they are U.S. citizens, Burger said. "We don't really have a way of validating that. We need to do that. We need to regularly scrub our list, and we need to keep noncitizens from coming onto the list."

[...bit about there being no mechanism to verify citizenship deleted... PC concerns about "racial profiling" deleted... comments from an "immigration advocate" saying there's not a problem and perhaps threatening a law suit deleted...]

Posted to Immigration2004 at August 17, 2004 12:24 PM

Comments