California’s ‘Motor Voter’ system has produced the kind of results that you would expect from a power-grabbing, progressive bureaucracy.

California’s ambitious effort to automate voter registration at Department of Motor Vehicle offices produced almost 84,000 duplicate records and more than twice that number with political party mistakes, according to an audit released Friday by state officials. The analysis covered just the first five months of the new “motor voter” program, which was launched in April 2018. It found a wide array of problems with the rollout of the DMV system, including a limited amount of testing as well as inconsistent and confusing lines of communication between the state agencies involved in its creation. Many of the findings align with documents discovered by the Los Angeles Times in an investigation earlier this year of the motor voter program. Auditors reviewed more than 3 million voter registration files, comparing records from both DMV and California’s secretary of state. They found 83,684 duplicate voter registrations, a mistake attributed to inconsistencies in what was listed for voters’ political party preferences.

It seems that California officials were warned that the Motor Voter system was not ready for its official launch last year. Undaunted, the politicos moved forward with the program.

As California prepared to launch its new Motor Voter program last year, top elections officials say they asked Secretary of State Alex Padilla to hold off on the roll-out. The plan called for the Department of Motor Vehicles to automatically register people who came into its offices, one of several efforts by Democrats controlling California politics to make it easier for more people to vote. With the June 2018 primary approaching, election officials said they warned that the department that manages car registration and boat licenses was not yet prepared to register voters. “There wasn’t the appropriate readiness to go forward in April, and that was brought to the Secretary of State,” said Dean Logan, registrar for Los Angeles County, adding that he “definitely expressed concern” to the Secretary of State’s Office, as well as Padilla himself.

As RealClearPolitics contributor Susan Crabtree notes, there was also a cyberattack on the California system before the June 2018 primary that exposed serious vulnerabilities with the system. It is also not clear from subsequent investigations of the attack and other system glitches that were also reported if any noncitizens were allowed to vote in the June 2018 primary and what impact the botched rollout had on the midterm elections across the state.

Questions also remain over whether the problems, combined with several other recent state laws designed to ease voter registration and the process of getting ballots to the ballot box — including the most lenient ballot-harvesting law in the nation — exacerbated ballot-box irregularities. In the lead-up to the midterms, California also passed a law that allowed people to register to vote the same day of an election, making verifying their U.S. citizenship and California residency nearly impossible.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that as mail-in and absentee ballots were counted after the November 2018 election, Republicans lost several seats in California districts. The losses include seven in Orange Country, a former reliably red area of the state.

One has to wonder if the confluence of these glitches, problems, and hiccups didn’t contribute to the further bluing of this state.

And there is also the question as to whether California’s troubled Motor Voter system will cast a shadow over 2020 election results!



