Proposed California Bill Would Enable Voter Fraud

By Joe Guzzardi
April 5, 2015

AB 1461, promoted in the name of increasing voter participation, is the brainchild of and supported by Sacramento’s most extreme, agenda-driven radicals including Secretary of State Alex Padilla. The legislature’s Hispanic advocacy core sell their ideas as beneficial to all Californians. Instead, they’re costly. Brown, for example, defended AB 60 as a measure that would increase road safety. But in order to efficiently process the applications, DMV opened four new offices, hired 1,000 new employees and sent the multimillion dollar tab to beleaguered taxpayers. 

In the California legislature, another bill that would accommodate unlawful immigrants is racing its way toward Governor Jerry Brown’s desk. AB 1461, the New Motor Voter Act, would automatically register to vote anyone who applies for a state driver’s license. Pursuant to Brown’s 2013 AB 60 law that allows illegal immigrants to drive, the Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that it has received about 500,000 applications since the beginning of 2015, and projects that 1.5 million licenses could be distributed within two years.

Approved by the Assembly Transportation Committee last week, AB 1461 could allow California’s voting age illegal immigrants to participate in municipal, state and federal elections, an open invitation to colossal fraud. 

The New Motor Voter Act could have more than fiscal consequences. Voting is a privilege reserved for citizens. If the right to vote is given to illegal immigrants, the democratic process is subverted.

In their House Oversight Committee testimonies last year, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Ohio Secretary of State John Husted warned that once illegals have access to the same identification that citizens have, there’s no effective way to verify their status. Said Husted: "These are the same documents [driver’s licenses] that federal law requires the states to recognize as valid forms of identification for registration."  Kobach, a long-time champion of secure voting laws, noted in his 2014 re-election campaign that every time an alien votes, it cancels an American citizen’s vote.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzales, AB 1461’s author, illogically insists that the motor voter bill would not apply to aliens, but without explaining how they would be excluded. Don’t count on DMV to differentiate between citizens and aliens. DMV’s lax standards require only “satisfactory proof” of legal residency.

The widely-accepted judgment about voter fraud is that incidents are so few that its impact is negligible. Efforts to implement voter ID to prevent fraud are cast as racist or thinly disguised attempts to keep poor and minority voters from participating in elections.

But last year, three Old Dominion University scholars analyzed voter fraud in its report titled “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections” which Electoral Studies published. Their findings concluded that “some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections.”

Issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in January, and then following up in April with a motor voter bill smacks of craven Sacramento politics. California’s legislators should show as much determination to pass bills that help citizens as they do to advance illegal immigrants’ causes.

California has more pressing problems beyond providing health care to unlawful immigrants: poverty, income inequality, and education, to name a few. The state ranks at or near the bottom in the nation in those dire social challenges. Yet the legislature remains focused on providing more illegal immigrant entitlements. If only Sacramento had equal resolve to help all Californians, the state would be better off.

###
Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. Contact him at [email protected]