GOP chairman ups ante on motor-voter snafu
Schneider suggests noncitizen voting was ‘done on purpose’ as Pritzker scoffs at critics
Illinois Republican Party Chairman Timothy Schneider suggests a motor-voter snafu that resulted in about a dozen noncitizens being allowed to vote was “done on purpose.” (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
The head of the state’s Republican Party is suggesting that the motor-voter snafu that allowed about a dozen noncitizens to vote illegally was “done on purpose.”
Although Illinois GOP Chairman Timothy Schneider originally responded to the motor-voter glitch last week by granting that “mistakes are made,” on Monday he told Herrin radio station WJPF that “you wonder if this was really done on purpose.” The comment was reported on Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax.
Although Gov. J.B. Pritzker did not respond to Schneider’s new charges at an appearance Monday, he scoffed at the notion that it was an ongoing problem and insisted the state’s voting rolls had already been restored to remove the illegally registered residents.
While Schneider’s original response called for the Automatic Voter Registration program to be “temporarily suspended until we get answers,” Pritzker rebuffed that and said the answers were already apparent.
“We’re being very careful at our agencies and how it’s being implemented now, but there’s no reason to have an across-the-board pause, especially when the glitch has been fixed,” the governor said Monday at a news conference on election security for the upcoming state primary in March and the general election in November. “And we’re going to have hearings to make sure we’re ferreting out what went wrong with this glitch.”
The controversy stems from the discovery last month that 574 driver’s license applicants checked a box stating they were “noncitizens,” but in a mistake by Secretary of State’s Office nonetheless had their information forwarded to the Board of Elections under the Automatic Voter Registration program since it took effect in July 2018.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that, according to Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich, “since then, 19 ballots have been cast by 16 individual voters who were improperly registered: 10 in the 2018 general election; one in the 2019 consolidated primary; and eight in the 2019 consolidated general election. … Those votes occurred in Champaign, Christian, Cook, DuPage, Lee, Macon, and Peoria counties and the city of Chicago. One improperly registered voter in Chicago cast ballots in all three elections.”
State officials have said they’ve tracked down the erroneous enrollees and have removed them from voting rolls. Pritzker said Monday those who cast votes are under investigation, as are state officials who erred in passing their registration along and adding them to rolls.
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We’re being very careful at our agencies and how (motor voter) is being implemented now, but there’s no reason to have an across-the-board pause, especially when the glitch has been fixed.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
But Schneider attempted Monday to turn it into a partisan issue — even though the so-called motor-voter initiative passed the General Assembly with unanimous bipartisan support and was signed into law by Pritzker’s Republican predecessor, Bruce Rauner.
“When you look at the rhetoric that they espouse every day, the Democrats, they’re always, they’re, they’re asking for illegal immigrants to be able to vote,” Schneider told WJPF. “If you take their rhetoric and you put it together, you wonder if this was really done on purpose or if it was just a so-called glitch as you call it.”
Henry Haupt, a spokesman for Secretary of State Jesse White, responded Tuesday with a statement calling those remarks “offensive and wrong.”
Haupt added: “The fact is last month we discovered an isolated programming error that impacted 574 people out of more than 600,000 of those registered through the Automatic Voter Registration program. While this represents less than one-tenth of 1 percent, it is still not acceptable and we apologize for the error.
“On the same day the programming error was confirmed, it was fixed and won’t happen again. We quickly notified the Illinois State Board of Elections along with the 574 people impacted – all of whom are in the country legally.
“To be clear, our office takes this situation very seriously, and while we immediately fixed the program upon discovery, we apologize for the error and to those impacted. We will continue to work closely with the Illinois State Board of Elections and will help anyone adversely impacted by this situation.”
Schneider’s remarks call for a response on a couple of other issues as well. First, no Democratic politician is on the record as stating that immigrants who aren’t U.S. citizens should vote. The closest anyone has come to actually suggesting that is Eric Zorn, who has to be considered one of the most Democratic columnists at the Republican Chicago Tribune. He wrote a piece last week wondering aloud, “What’s so terrible about allowing noncitizens to vote?”
Zorn added: “Immigrants pay taxes and in some cases own property, serve in our military, and volunteer for political campaigns. Many are hoping to become citizens one day. Their interest in the laws that govern them is similar in nearly all ways to the interests of U.S. citizens.
“Far from horrifying me, the fact that a dozen or so noncitizens seem to have voted simply prompts me to wonder why we don’t allow more of them to vote.
“After all, how can a nation conceived on the idea that taxation without representation is morally reprehensible, and that power derives from the consent of the governed, deny elected representation to more than 12 million U.S. taxpayers who reside here legally?”
Good points, even if none of them are addressed by Schneider’s knee-jerk response.
Instead, Schneider appeared to be drawing on a conspiracy theory that has already been flagged on Facebook as false news and misinformation (sometimes repeated, without evidence, by President Trump). That conspiracy theory appears to come from last year’s U.S. House vote on a voting-rights bill — House Resolution 1 — that, of course, passed the House but has yet to be taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate.
According to Politifact, House Democrats rejected, in a party-line vote of 228-197, a Republican amendment that stated: “It is the sense of Congress that allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.”
Republicans tried to suggest that voting against that amendment demonstrated proof of wanting undocumented immigrants to vote. But, as Politifact pointed out: “The United States already has a law that prevents noncitizens from casting a ballot for president or other federal offices. HR 1 doesn’t change that law — and HR 1 doesn’t call for extending the right to vote to noncitizens.”
More to the point, however, as we at One Illinois pointed out last week, while Illinois Democrats are up in arms as much as Republicans in questioning the motor-voter glitch and calling for investigations, that glitch resulted in fewer than 20 miscast ballots over three elections. Republicans, meanwhile, are systematically trying to remove hundreds of thousands of legal voters from election rolls in Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, and other states.
So Schneider’s Monday remarks don’t just border on hypocrisy, they plant a GOP flag right on top of a huge pile of hypocrisy. But that’s the state of the political system these days.