By Illinois Radio Network
SPRINGFIELD – A problem with Illinois’ automatic voter registration program that led to hundreds of people who said they weren’t U.S. citizens being registered to vote took center stage at a listening session hosted by a central Illinois congressman in Springfield on Monday.
The automatic voter registration law was enacted in Illinois with bipartisan support in 2018 and required certain state agencies such as the Illinois Secretary of State to automatically forward the information of a person anytime they interact with a state agency to the Illinois State Board of Elections and then to local elections authorities for voter registration.
Illinois elections are handled on a county level, or in some instances by local election commissions, not by the state, meaning it is decentralized. Voter records are maintained by those local officials. The automatic voter registration system pushes voter information from the state to local officials.
Last month, it was revealed more than 540 people who said they weren’t U.S. citizens were improperly registered to vote because of a programming error in the state’s automatic voter registration system. One of those people voted. The Secretary of State’s office acknowledged the error in computer code and said it had corrected the issue.
There was another instance of hundreds of formerly incarcerated people who were disqualified from voting through the program when they should have been qualified to register to vote. Prison inmates don’t have voting rights, but in Illinois, once someone has served their time and is released from prison, they can re-register to vote and cast a ballot.
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, hosted a listening session in Springfield on Monday at the Sangamon County boardroom with state and local elections officials to discuss the issues.
“We’ve seen first hand that our nation’s elections face threats from abroad, but the threats I found equally, if not even sometimes more concerning, have occurred through errors and bad practices within our own systems,” Davis said.
Davis said as millions of federal tax dollars come back to Illinois for election security. He said it was important to have transparent oversight regarding what was happening with the state’s election systems.
During the hearing, Sangamon County Clerk Don Gray said his office wasn’t part of any initial testing before the Secretary of State launched the program. Gray said his office takes the information it gets from the state on good faith.
After his office was notified of the programming error, Gray said his staff found one person who was improperly registered in Sangamon County.
“They did not cast a ballot,” Gray said. “We’re lucky in that sense.”
He said his office sent three different rounds of notifications to the individual, but never made contact and eventually, after due process, the person was suspended from the system.
But there was at least one noncitizen erroneously registered to vote in Illinois who did cast a ballot, state officials said.
Gray said more communication and testing were needed.
“We deserve to be a part of that system, we need to be part of the advance modification to any type of system because we’ve got real insight,” Gray said. “And I’m accountable to the public that this is done correctly.”
Counties are required to have a paper trail for voting by law and Gray said there should also be a paper trail for the automatic voter registration to test the accuracy of the system.
“In years past we received it by mail from the Secretary of State’s office,” Gray said. “The state for years has had motor voter laws, where people can request to register to vote when going to a drivers’ service facility. “We had that paper backup, we had seen exactly how the person had filled out the paperwork.”
State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, said he wants the legislature to pass an audit resolution to look at all aspects of the automatic voter registration system.
“For the entire AVR system, not just a single agency, but across the board, all the agencies so we can take an in-depth look at what the issues are surrounding AVR,” Butler said.
Illinois State Board of Elections Executive Director Steve Sandvoss said the board recently voted down a resolution for an audit, but said more should be done.
“Maybe increased testing of the information that gets transmitted from the Secretary of State and other agencies to us just to verify that what they’re sending us is what they should be sending us,” Sandvoss said. “I think that would accomplish the same thing that a quote-unquote audit would do.”
Butler said the other state agencies that were not implementing the automatic voter registration program were breaking the law.
Davis said it should be fixed.
“I think it’s terrible that when a plan is put in place with such bipartisan support and you still have two agencies who are supposed to be utilizing this system not online, that’s a failure and that needs to be addressed,” Davis said.
Another issue that was discussed Monday concerned other voter registration issues. The Secretary of State answered questions about a policy that had the agency send information of 16-year-olds to the state board for registration. None of those individuals were registered to vote and the Secretary of State’s office said it discontinued that practice.
Illinois Radio Network can be reached at [email protected].
