In response to Secretary of State Dianna Duran’s allegations that foreign nationals are using driver’s licenses to illegally vote, Somos Un Pueblo Unido issued the following statement.:

“We continue to be disturbed by this attempt to tarnish the immigrant driver’s license program as a whole and to imply that noncitizens are voting illegally.  To suggest that there is a link between driver’s licenses and illegal voting is simply preposterous.  We can count on these kinds of false claims and provocative rhetoric during election season, but most of these allegations across the country turn up baseless or founded on isolated incidents.

The so-called “foreign national database” the Secretary of State compared to the voter rolls is nothing more than a list of those persons who did not provide a social security number when they applied for a license. This database includes US Citizens who between 2003 and 2007 were not required to provide a SSN and immigrants who have become Naturalized Citizens since their initial license application and who are in fact entitled to vote. Therefore, matching this irrelevant list with the names of persons who have voted skews the data and cannot conceivably reveal evidence of fraudulent voting.   The Secretary of State is looking for information that is simply not within the MVD database.  Moreover, without contacting the individuals on the list to verify citizenship, her assertion that they are illegally voting is premature, irresponsible, and could lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

We can only conclude that the Secretary of State is either being disingenuous or she just doesn’t understand the MVD database.  Either way, this appears to be an absurdly ineffective use of her department’s resources. It is disappointingly just one more example of a politician stoking unfounded fears about a minority class of people.”

A summary of reports by the Immigration Policy Institute on allegations of noncitizens voting can be found here:

http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/chicken-little-voting-booth-non-existent-problem-non-citizen-“voter-fraud”