Five hundred forty-five people who were not American citizens were improperly registered to vote in Illinois in the last two years — and you can bet that news gives aid and comfort to conspiracy theorists who see voter fraud around every corner.

It is utterly unacceptable that the office of Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White has registered non-citizens to vote — even one — in American elections. The faster the flaw in automatic voter registration is eliminated, the better.

The danger is not fixed elections — the numbers are too small for that — but the perception of fixed elections.

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There’s a whole cottage industry of Republican conspiracy peddlers, President Donald Trump included, who continue to insist, based on nothing, that Democrats are stealing elections like crazy. That has given Republicans a pretext to impose new rules making it tougher for millions of legitimate voters — read American citizens who lean Democratic — to cast a ballot.

Debunked claims of fraud

Trump and the others have pushed a debunked claim that non-citizens voted by the hundreds of thousands for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump even appointed a true believer in this bogus notion, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, to head a national commission that would dig up the proof.

The commission dug up nothing.

Bu now Illinois has given the conspiracists a tiny new nail to hang their hat on.

As reported Wednesday, 545 self-identified non-U.S. citizens were mistakenly registered to vote through the state’s new automatic registration systems — and 16 of those folks actually cast ballots in 2018 and 2019. How many of the 16 were still non-citizens at the time they voted remains unclear.

“Programming error”

White’s office said a “programming error” at driver services facilities resulted in information about the 545 people being forwarded to local election authorities for purposes of automatic registration, even though the people had said they were not citizens.

Social media is lighting up again with claims that Democrats are secretly engineering voter fraud. On Wednesday, the conservative Washington Times snidely wrote, “But remember: Fears of voter fraud are the stuff of right-wing conspiracies. Or so goes the liberal media narrative.”

Four Illinois Republican legislators have asked for an immediate investigative hearing by the House Executive Committee, which makes excellent sense. As Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, said in a statement, “There is absolutely no room for administrative error when it comes to properly conducting our election system.”

Three years ago, Illinois enacted a law that requires eligible Illinois citizens to be automatically registered to vote when they interact with certain state offices, unless they choose to opt out. Applying for or renewing a driver’s license is one of those interactions.

It was a good law then, and it’s a good one now. Citizens should be encouraged to vote, not discouraged, and every major study has concluded that the risk of fraud created by automatic voter registration systems is extremely small.

A 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found only 31 credible instances nationwide of in-person voter fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. A study by a Barnard College assistant professor of political science found that at the federal level only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting between 2002 and 2005. Studies done in 2012 and 2016 at Arizona State University also found negligible rates of fraud.

Another wrinkle

When non-citizens do vote, they put themselves at serious risk of deportation, which adds another wrinkle to the problem. Voter fraud should carry hefty penalties, but not for non-citizens who, through no intention to deceive of their own, were registered to vote automatically.

When that voter card came in the mail, it no doubt looked like an invitation to vote — legally.

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