State official says employee error led to 273 non-US citizens on voter rolls

Joshua Haiar, South Dakota Searchlight

The South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office is blaming the state Department of Public Safety for errors that allowed 273 non-U.S. citizens to register to vote.

“These non U.S. citizens had marked ‘no’ to the citizenship question on their driver’s license application but were incorrectly processed as U.S. citizens due to human error by the Department of Public Safety,” wrote Rachel Soulek, director of the Division of Elections in the Secretary of State’s Office, in response to South Dakota Searchlight questions.

Noncitizens can obtain a driver’s license or state ID if they are lawful permanent residents or have temporary legal status. There’s a part of the driver’s license form that allows an applicant to register to vote. That part says voters must be citizens.

Searchlight shared Soulek’s statement with the Department of Public Safety on Thursday and asked for a response, but the department did not immediately reply.

State election offices are responsible for reviewing the submitted registration forms, according to the Bipartisan Policy Institute. Verification can involve cross-referencing databases, such as the Social Security Administration or state records, to confirm the applicant’s eligibility.

The improper registrations are being purged, state officials said earlier this week.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, while noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections, mistakes can occur during the registration process. They say such mistakes are typically accidental and not driven by malicious intent.

Soulek said only one of the 273 noncitizens had ever cast a ballot. That was during the 2016 general election.

Searchlight sought the added information after the Department of Public Safety issued a news release Monday announcing it had worked with the Secretary of State’s Office and the state Bureau of Information and Telecommunications to purge the noncitizens from voter rolls.

“This discovery was part of a review to ensure the integrity of South Dakota’s elections and safeguard against improper voter registration,” the news release said.

The department said nothing further in the news release about how the noncitizens were discovered on the voter rolls, how they became registered in the first place, what counties they registered in, or whether any of the noncitizens had ever cast a ballot.

Spokesman Brad Reiners, who shared the news release with South Dakota media, responded Monday to Searchlight questions about the news release by saying “the press release speaks for itself” and referring questions to the Secretary of State’s Office.

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota alleged Tuesday that the state violated the National Voter Registration Act. The act prohibits voter list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election unless it’s based on individualized information or investigations, the ACLU said.

Samantha Chapman, ACLU of South Dakota’s advocacy manager, said the state can make individualized inquiries into specific voters with evidence to support its claims that an individual is not legally eligible to vote, but “it cannot enact blanket purges based on potentially inaccurate databases this close to the election.”

“The risk of disenfranchising eligible voters at this late stage is simply too high when voters have a mere 13 days before the voter registration deadline,” Chapman said.