More Voter Registration Problems at the DMV

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has come under intense scrutiny this week after admitting that it mistakenly registered 1,500 individuals to vote, prompting a sharp rebuke from the secretary of state and other government officials in Sacramento. It’s the latest controversy for the agency, which last month announced it had botched 23,000 separate voter registrations.

California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, called the lapse “wholly unacceptable” in a scathing letter to Jean Shiomoto, the DMV director, and Amy Tong, the director of the California Department of Technology.

Padilla called on the agencies to hire a third-party inspector to conduct an audit.

“I remain deeply frustrated and disappointed that persistent errors by the DMV and CDT have undermined public confidence in your basic responsibility to collect and transmit accurate voter registration information,” he wrote.

At the center of the controversy is California’s new Motor Voter program, which automatically registers eligible voters who visit the DMV to renew or replace their driver’s licenses. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Padilla said that freezing the program, which began this year, was “certainly on the table.”

Mark Meuser, who is running against Padilla for secretary of state, seized on the news to blame Padilla for the “incompetence” at the DMV.

“This situation keeps snowballing,” Meuser said in a statement. “It needs to be fixed. It’s vital that Alex Padilla is held accountable for his failed program of voter registration through the DMV affecting approximately a hundred thousand Californians.”

A spokesperson for Padilla declined to comment on Meuser’s attack but noted that “upon being notified by DMV of their processing error, our office directed county elections officials to immediately cancel the registration records for those identified individuals.”

The DMV said the 1,500 individuals affected did not need to take any action themselves to correct the mistake. The secretary of state’s office will cancel the voter registration directly, but individuals who are worried about their voter records can check their status online.

“We have worked quickly with the Department of Technology to correct these errors and have also updated the programming and added additional safeguards to improve this process,” Shiomoto, the DMV director, said in a statement.