Local election authorities say a verification tool used in Missouri flagged citizens for removal from voter rolls
Alison Patton
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins is asking local election authorities to verify voters’ citizenship status after a federal program flagged people for potential illegal status. However, many county clerks have spotted citizens on the list.
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said Hoskins sent her a list of 74 voters in November whose immigration status needed to be confirmed.
“We could see just from looking at the numbers and looking at the actual voters that were on it, that many of them were naturalized citizens,” Lennon said. “One [voter] we actually registered at their naturalization ceremony.”
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements is a federal program that allows the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify a person’s status. Hoskins uploaded Missouri voter rolls to the program within the past year.
The Secretary of State’s Office sent lists of voters who needed status verification to county clerks across the state in November. In December, over half of Missouri county clerks signed a letter addressed to Speaker of the House Jon Patterson about Hoskins’ overreach and the inaccurate data the SAVE program provided.
The letter provides two solutions for lawmakers to consider: the Department of Revenue shares immigration statuses with local election authorities, or pass a law that modifies the opportunities noncitizens and citizens have to register to vote.
Lennon said Patterson and other lawmakers didn’t respond to the letter.
About a month after the letter was sent, Hoskins sent another list of flagged voters, which cut down the voters on the first list.
“So we didn’t give anything back to the Secretary of State’s Office. I don’t know what happened between the first and the second, really only the Secretary of State’s Office know,” Lennon said.
Lennon said her office still hasn’t done anything to verify the status of the people on either list because the voters indicated on their voter registration that they were citizens.
Clinton Jenkins is the Miller County clerk and the president of the Missouri Association of County Clerksand Election Authorities.
He said members of the association agree that citizen status needs to be checked, but it needs to be done accurately.
“The last thing we want to do is have an actual verified voter removed from the record by mistake,” Jenkins said. “We have time to do this, especially before the August primary election. So let’s pump the brakes and let’s figure this out to do it the right way.”