WASHINGTON - Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) announced the Committee's minority, which has oversight authority of federal elections, plans to host a listening session in Illinois following the Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) admission of having over 500 non-U.S. citizens registered in their Automatic Voter Registration program (AVR). Not only are these non-citizens registered to vote in Illinois, but several non-citizens may have voted in the 2018 election and previous elections.

The Illinois Secretary of State's office has admitted that it sent erroneous registrations collected through its DMV offices to the ISBE, which administers the AVR system. Ranking Member Davis invited IL Secretary of State Jesse White to participate in a congressional listening session to be hosted in Illinois to review the administrative errors in the Automatic Voter Registration program.

"I am disappointed to see a program with such good intentions be so poorly administered," said Ranking Member Davis. "Automatic Voter Registration has the potential to encourage more voter participation, but as we've seen, if it's not carefully administered, it can have major consequences on the integrity of our elections. This egregious error further highlights the need for states to regularly update their registration rolls and how H.R. 1, which federally mandates processes like Automatic Voter Registration for every state, can have serious issues for states with even less infrastructure than Illinois. I'm planning to convene a listening session, through the Committee on House Administration, where I hope to hear from the IL Secretary of State about how he intends to solve this error and reassure Illinois voters that non-citizens are not being registered to vote."

Background:
The Illinois State Board of Elections acknowledged that out of 574 non-U.S. citizens who were inadvertently registered to vote in Illinois, an unknown number of them may have voted illegally in the 2018 election. View the initial coverage here: https://www.wcia.com/illinois-capitol-news/state-board-of-elections-admits-non-u-s-citizens-may-have-voted-illegally-in-2018/

You can read Ranking Member Davis' letter to the IL Secretary of State by clicking here.

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