Posted on 09/19/2024 8:11:06 AM PDT by Presbyterian Reporter
Florida’s top election official is accusing the Biden administration of not being cooperative enough as states attempt to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.
Secretary of State Cord Byrd said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration database would be the best tool he uses to check the citizenship status of registered voters — if it were reliable.
Byrd, who was appointed to his position by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in 2022, said Florida is one of a handful of states that uses the DHS dataset, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, to see if immigrants have been naturalized.
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd testifies about noncitizen voting in a hearing to the Committee on House Administration on Capitol Hill, Thursday, May 16, 2024 in Washington. In recent months, the specter of noncitizens voting in the U.S. has erupted into a leading rallying cry for Republicans. (AP Photo/John McDonnell) Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd testifies about noncitizen voting in a hearing to the Committee on House Administration on Capitol Hill, Thursday, May 16, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell) The database was originally intended for federal and state governments to check whether a person was qualified for certain public benefits, but Florida was among the first states to begin using it about a decade ago to check voter eligibility.
However, Byrd said, it costs money to query the database and can take weeks. He said DHS also does not keep the most up-to-date information in it about who has been naturalized, even as tens of thousands of Floridians gain citizenship each year.
“It’s not properly updated,” Byrd said. “It’s costly, and we have to have the alien registration number for it to give us a positive result, and many times, we get evidence of somebody being a noncitizen, but they don’t have the alien registration number, so even where we can use [the database], we can’t because states don’t always have that information.”
Byrd has since May, when he first testified before Congress on the matter, been imploring DHS to proactively give updated lists to states that show who has been naturalized, but the federal government refuses, he said.
“That’s the only tool we have,” Byrd said. “They’ve pretty much gone radio silent, as far as the Biden administration. They’re not cooperative. They don’t help us.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Maintaining the voter rolls — that is, keeping a list of voters who are registered and eligible to vote — is a legal responsibility of secretaries of state.
Through this process, some states, including Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, have discovered hundreds or thousands of noncitizens on their voter rolls in recent years despite it being against the law for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Byrd said that in the last month, his office has on a weekly basis flagged dozens of registered voters who could be noncitizens for counties to then screen and remove from the rolls, if necessary.
In Florida, the vast majority of voters become registered to vote when they obtain a driver’s license or other identification card from the state government. That weeds out most noncitizens, Byrd said, because Floridians need to provide citizenship information to the government agency at that time. If they are a noncitizen, they cannot move forward with their voter registration.
However, if a person registers to vote outside of that process, the applicant merely checks off a box about their citizenship status on a form and signs it, swearing that it is truthful. Federal law prohibits states from asking for documentation of citizenship during this process.
However, if a person registers to vote outside of that process, the applicant merely checks off a box about their citizenship status on a form and signs it, swearing that it is truthful. Federal law prohibits states from asking for documentation of citizenship during this process.""""
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So for those non-citizens who do not register via the motor voter process, why doesn't the FL Secretary of State check to see if that non-citizen's driver's license show the person to be, in fact, a non-citizen??????
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”
Maybe the DHS is afraid the radios will explode if they turn them on. I mean, considering the company they keep.
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