More than 23,000 Californians registered to vote incorrectly by state DMV

[diva77]

Source: Los Angeles Times

By John Myers Sep 05, 2018 4:50 PM Sacramento


Tens of thousands of Californians have been registered to vote incorrectly by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, including mistakes that assigned some voters the wrong political party preference, officials said Wednesday.

Officials insist the errors were limited to only a small number of the 1.4 million voter registration files sent to elections offices between late April, when California's new automated "motor voter" system went into effect, and early August. The error did not, officials said, allow anyone other than a U.S. citizen to register to vote. Californians who were affected will soon receive notification in the mail to check their voter registration status.

Jean Shiomoto, the state's DMV director, and Amy Tong, director of the California Department of Technology, described the problem as "an administrative processing error" in a letter to Secretary of State Alex Padilla, California's chief elections officer.

"We are committed to getting this right and are working closely with the Secretary of State's office to correct the errors that occurred," Shiomoto said in a written statement. Tong declined to comment beyond the letter.

The errors, which were discovered more than a month ago, happened when DMV employees did not clear their computer screens between customer appointments. That caused some voter information from the previous appointment, such as language preference or a request to vote by mail, to be "inadvertently merged" into the file of the next customer, Shiomoto and Tong wrote. The incorrect registration form was then sent to state elections officials, who used it to update California's voter registration database.


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-dmv-voter-registration-error-20180905-story.html#

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Another "glitch" that impairs the voting process. Would be interesting to find out whether the "errors" occurred in swing districts and favored rethugs. Also, officials usually estimate numbers far lower than the actual numbers -- I'm willing to bet it was more than 23,000.

[kimbutgar]

1. Well at least it was detected in time for people to get registered correctly to vote in November

But if those registrations are in repuke districts the gloves should be off.

[rpannier]

2. It happened at the state level and it is California

I doubt the state conspired to suppress voters

[diva77]

3. For decades, the rethugs controlled the offices of elections officials in CA

There's a lot of that around still. There's a lot of shadow activity that goes on.

[ansible]

4. Nah, CA DMV is just that crappy

They somehow managed to completely screw up my renewed driver's license last June and sent it to "3rd st" instead of "23rd st" where I am. Had to spend the whole day at the DMV just to get them to correct it again.

[diva77]

5. The error seems innocuous when you only focus on it as an isolated incident. When you look at the

aggregate, then you start to see something else happening.

[riversedge]

6. what a mess for everybody.