Registered voters; citizenship, SAVE Program. (SB1077)

The ACLU of Virginia is opposed to this legislation. There is no evidence that immigrants who are not U.S. citizens or undocumented immigrants are voting in Virginia. This legislation would permit the State Board of Elections to utilize information from federal immigration data bases to review voter registration files. In Florida where this program was implemented, it "found" 207 noncitizens registered to vote (.0018% of the electorate of nearly 11.5 million registered voters). At the same time, however, using the system threatened to invite challenges of the voter registrations of thousands of naturalized citizens who became naturalized after applying for and receiving state driver's licenses or other ID linked to the voter registration system or whose last names and birth dates are the same as people in the system. This is because to in order to access SAVE, Florida drew on immigration-related information provided to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). They compared the names of noncitizens in DMV records to the names of registered voters. Election officials then used SAVE to try to eliminate false positives by determining whether the individuals on both lists became citizens after obtaining a driver’s license.

Virginia ACLU opposes this legislation that would permit the State Board of Elections to utilize information from federal immigration data bases to review voter registration files. In Florida where this program was implemented, it "found" 207 noncitizens registered to vote (.0018% of the electorate of nearly 11.5 million registered voters). At the same time, however, using the system threatened to invite challenges of the voter registrations of thousands of naturalized citizens who became naturalized after applying for and receiving state driver's licenses or other ID linked to the voter registration system or whose last names and birth dates are the same as people in the system. This is because to in order to access SAVE, Florida drew on immigration-related information provided to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). They compared the names of noncitizens in DMV records to the names of registered voters. Election officials then used SAVE to try to eliminate false positives by determining whether the individuals on both lists became citizens after obtaining a driver’s license.