Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz had learned that more than 3,500 non-citizens may be registered to vote in Iowa with 1208 voting in the 2010 election. He received this information from the Iowa Department of Transportation records of non-citizens who have obtained an Iowa Driver’s license who then used that same license number to register to vote.
He would like to have non-citizens removed from the voter rolls. Which you would think would be seen as common sense. Not to the liberal of course. Rekha Basu pulls the race card. She basically says that this isn’t an effort to prevent voter fraud, no it’s an effort to suppress Latino voters. She wrote, “Sadly, this has the appearance of a fishing expedition designed to keep Latino immigrants — who tend to vote Democratic — from voting. Iowa is a swing state, after all.”
Basu also tried to poke holes in the process:
The emergency rules Schultz approved quietly and unilaterally allow him to challenge people’s eligibility to vote if one of two government lists flag them as noncitizens. But as Schultz was warned by a federal official in charge of one list, there are good reasons the lists can be wrong.
One of the lists is of licensed Iowa drivers, and it shows who wasn’t a citizen when he or she got licensed. Checking those names against registered voters, Schultz claims 3,582 people marked as noncitizens are registered to vote in Iowa.
But a driver’s license is good for five years. What Schultz didn’t say, and maybe didn’t know, is that in the five years ending last Sept. 30, 11,492 Iowans became U.S. citizens.
Which is why Matt Schultz is trying to access the federal government’s immigration and citizenship database, SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification and Entitlements) so no person would be flagged unnecessarily. Schultz doesn’t have the authority under the Iowa Code to remove voters from the roles, but instead would make two written attempts to verify an individual’s non-citizenship status before forwarding that information onto their county auditor’s office for investigation. The county auditor can then challenge and remove the individual from the voter rolls if necessary.
But Basu says that’s not good enough.
Officials there have written to Schultz saying that using it to verify citizenship has significant limitations since the office doesn’t have access to birth certificates — only naturalization information.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but when dealing with non-citizens isn’t the birth certificate irrelevant? It’s the naturalization information that is needed. It seems to me that when you cross check the Iowa DOT information or from some other Iowa government list that identifies that individual as a non-citizen, then seeing that person on the voter rolls, then if their name is still listed as a non-citizen using the SAVE database (which unsurprisingly Schultz still hasn’t received access to) and then having the County Auditor investigate after not one, but two written verification attempts don’t you think due diligence is being done not to remove a legitimate voter?
Matt Schultz is trying to do his job and prevent voter fraud from taking place, not target Latino voters. The charge is ridiculous and Basu should be ashamed. This is yet another example of why Iowa needs to have a voter ID law. Status quo which Basu and liberals advocate just turns a blind eye to voter fraud. With a potentially close election, and as the results of the Iowa Caucus demonstrated, we need to be concerned over even a handful of illegitimate voters.
