Voting Rights and Immigration

When I was an elections officer in the November 2008 election (yes, I was already an anarchist, and yes, I recognize there's a bit of disonance there, but hey at least I declined to work in the Census), everyone on my team was instructed to not ask the voters for their I.D. Since it's a citizen's almost unqualified right to vote, possession of an I.D. should not be a requisite for voting - so we were told. When someone came up to my table and showed me their driver's license, I'd say "Put that away, I don't need your I.D."

So when we looked at our list of registered voters in our precinct, we would basically be taking their word for it that they were who they claimed to be. You could imagine a problem arising there, but thankfully that problem didn't happen at our polling place.

(Do keep in mind, this is the San Francisco Bay Area we're talking about. I don't know what it's like in other parts of California, let alone other states.)

But our open-door policy went a bit further than declining to check people's I.D. Again, voting is a right, so showing up at the wrong polling place to vote shouldn't prevent you from voting. If you show up at the polling place and your name isn't on their list, and you don't have the time, energy, or willpower to go find the place where you should vote, the election officers just hand you a ballot with a special envelope, have you fill out your information on the envelope, and you can vote. Your ballot would be counted last, but it would probably still be counted, if the election results are too close to call without counting your vote, and the counters check your information and find you to be registered.

In other words, we - the election officers - were letting people vote with absolutely no proof that they were legally permitted to vote. If they were voting illegally, that was their problem, not ours.

We used a good number of special envelopes that day. Some special voters looked like they really were registered but just couldn't go to their real polling place. But there was at least one voter who I was quite confident had no legal business voting.

She looked like she came from Iran, or north India, or one of those places in between. She was ushered in by her family, most of whom had already voted earlier in the day. Her name wasn't on our list. She explained that she just arrived "here" a couple weeks ago (whether by "here" she meant the U.S. or the Silicon Valley I don't know), and it looked like she was enthusiastic to exercise her newly acquired right to vote. I did something I wasn't supposed to - I asked her if she was registered. She said she wasn't. I looked at our supervisor. Our supervisor nodded gracefully, with a "let's accomodate her anyway" look on her face, so I gave the voter a special envelope and showed her how to fill it out.

At the time I thought it was just an excersize in civic duty. When they find she's not registered, they'll just not count the ballot. But the consequences of voting when you're not supposed to can be much more severe than not getting your ballot counted.

If the woman was not a citizen (which I'm almost sure she wasn't), then her act of voting can count as a false claim to U.S. citizenship, which is a grounds of inadmissibility. Voting in a U.S. election before becoming a U.S. citizen can get in the way of you ever becoming a citizen. It can also get you deported.

Granted, the government has to show that the person actually meant to lie about their status. But the hassle of having to show up at court and defend yourself is a hassle that no one wants.

People have to be really careful about this. I heard a story about a Civics teacher who gave out voter registration forms and had his class fill them out. Nice little civics lesson. Now his students know how to register. He then went and submitted their forms for them, and at least one of his non-USC students got in trouble for registering to vote when they weren't supposed to.

You might think you're being graceful and accomodating. You might think you're acting in line with fundamental democratic principles of openness and free participation. You might think you're doing somebody else a favor; but you might also be hurting their position before the law. And the whole burden of your misinformation is going to be born by them - not you. So you're probably not doing one bit of a favor.

I hope to all the gods that that woman was already a U.S. citizen. If she wasn't, then she's gonna get in deep trouble for just following directions from somebody who was uninformed about the law. And what'll happen to the guy whose directions may have ruined her chances of becoming a full member of our society? Well, I'm going off to law school.