Mar 11 2010
Getting Stonewalled on Citizenship Questions
I wrote last September about the issue of citizenship as it relates to the radical proposal to automatically add people to voter rolls. At the time I mentioned that I had written an e-mail to the Committee to Modernize Registration asking what databases that would be used for this automatic registration process included information about citizenship. My email of September 1, 2009 was not responded to. I wrote again on November 20,2009. Still no response. I then followed up with a letter on February 12, 2010 to various members of the Committee to Modernize.
No one has responded.
It’s very simple. If you’re going to suggest that we automatically add people to the voter rolls from government databases, shouldn’t you at least be able to tell the public and policy makers about the ability of those databases to tell us who is a citizen or not?
There’s a lack of seriousness on the part of these reformers. Lots of noise. Lots of anecdotes about what they perceive to be wrong. But little in the way of facts. Heather Gerken’s Democracy Index used a couple hundred pages telling us how important data is. But in reality, there is little evidence that reformers are interested in data. And if they are interested, they’re not sharing any information they’ve found.
They’re aren’t too many good spins that can be put on the silence of the proponents of modernization regarding the issue of citizenship. Perhaps the most charitable reason is that they just don’t know the answers to these questions and don’t want to admit it. Less charitably, maybe they’re willing to put millions of noncitizens on the rolls if it means more eligible voters are added as well. Most cynically, any number of the “reformers” might be hoping that noncitizens are put on the rolls and end up voting.
You’d think that the one thing we could agree upon is that noncitizens should not be added to the voter registration rolls. But it appears that isn’t the case and it’s hard to imagine a consensus on reform that wouldn’t include that important element.
Mark, this is a good example of why election officials should be consulted with when planning election reform.
One thing that could result from automatically registering people who are not legal citizens is that we could inadvertantly cause these citizens to be guilty of a crime.
The persons registered would assume they are supposed to vote if in deed they are “registered”. Additionally, they may fear speaking up.