Investigators want details of DMV ‘glitch’ that allowed noncitizens to vote
The back and forth over noncitizen voting in 2016 N.C. elections took on a new layer this week, as the group Citizens for Renewing America blasted the State Board of Elections in a letter demanding answers about how election officials are preventing it from happening again this November.
“There is every reason to believe your state’s elections are not secure and the potential for noncitizens to vote in the upcoming midterms remains largely unaddressed,” wrote Russell Vought, president of Citizens for Renewing America.
The letter, addressed to Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections, challenges the board to prove that a 2016 “glitch” at the Division of Motor Vehicles, one that allowed noncitizens to register to vote in 2016, has been fixed.
“You may take issue with the assertion that the DMV pre-population practice remains an ongoing concern, but simply claiming the issue was resolved five years ago — when your agency appears to have failed to disclose the issue — is simply not good enough for the citizens of your state or the American people,” Vought wrote.
The conflict started when Vought appeared Aug. 12 on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” discussing documents his group and an affiliated organization, American Accountability Foundation, received through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Vought spoke on national television about “systemic voter fraud being done in North Carolina at the State Board of Election level and the DMV to incentivize illegal immigrants voting in the election.”
He tweeted links to 2021 documents and emails sent to Bell from G. Norman Acker III, then-acting-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The documents reveal details about NCSBE’s investigation into 2016 DMV applications that had the citizenship check-box pre-populated with “yes.” An unknown number of noncitizens were able to register to vote.
A 2017 NCSBE audit says it appears that at least 700 registrations may have been noncitizens, 136 of whom actually voted in the 2016 election. The NCSBE audit uncovered that 41 noncitizens with legal status (green cards) cast ballots in 2016, and 24 people were charged with “voting by alien.”
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Claiming recent actions by the NCSBE are overtly partisan, Vought wrote in Friday’s letter to elections leaders that N.C. voters and the rest of the country deserve more transparency from the state board.
“Your office usurped the state legislature to change voting laws in North Carolina in 2020, and therefore your record leaves your credibility in upholding the state’s election laws very much in question,” Vought wrote. “Indeed, your settlement at the behest of Democrat attorney Marc Elias to change the rules for mail-in ballots, which was repudiated by two federal judges as a flagrant violation of the legal system, evidences your commitment to partisanship over the rule of law.”
https://www.carolinajournal.com/inve...izens-to-vote/
- berryberry
- 08-22-2022, 02:23 PM