SACRAMENTO - Fiascos at California's Department of Motor Vehicles continue to make headlines. Today, technical issues affected several DMV offices around the state, and now a Los Angeles Times' article reports that the state agency just uncovered another 3,000 unintended voter registrations. These come on top of the 23,000 erroneous voter registrations disclosed two weeks ago. In August, a request by the Legislature to audit the DMV was killed by Senate Democrats. Senate Republicans, including Senators Joel Anderson (R-Alpine), Jim Nielsen (R-Tehama), Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) and Leader Patricia Bates (R-Laguna Niguel) are calling for an immediate audit of the DMV, saying the urgency is clear.
Excerpt:
Officials at California's Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday that an additional 3,000 people were mistakenly signed up to vote during the rollout of the state's new "motor voter" program, errors made during the spring and summer and part of a larger batch of problems first reported two weeks ago.
While the total number of registration errors between mid-April and early August remains the same — estimated at roughly 23,000 — the new discovery more than doubles the instances in which customers unsuccessfully tried to opt out of registering to vote, the DMV said.
Two weeks ago, DMV officials disclosed that a series of "administrative processing errors" were made when the department's employees failed to properly clear customer information from computer screens between appointments. In most cases, the errors involved details about the person's voter preferences - their political party affiliation and whether they wanted to receive a ballot in the mail, for example. ...
These are not the first reported problems with the launch of the motor voter law. In May, some 77,000 voter records were misreported to elections officials - in some cases, more than one registration form was generated by DMV computers for a single voter. Had that error gone unnoticed, in the most extreme cases it could have resulted in two ballots being issued to a single voter. ...
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