As California fights off a federal attempt to make the state’s elections play by the rules, voters in Fresno are being confronted with technology that can’t get it right.
The Fresno County Elections Department fessed up over an issue that tells voters they cast their ballots in the wrong contest, according to the New York Post.
When a voter wanting to make a choice in the Fresno Unified School District trustee race makes his or her choice at an electronic ballot-marking machine, the voter prints the ballot, but is told the vote was cast in the Fowler Unified School District.
Fresno County Registrar of Voters James Kus said that what voters read and what the technology is doing are not the same thing, and said all votes will go where they belong.
Election officials will post warning signs in polling places, with voters given the option of using a ballot printed at the polling place.
The glitch comes as federal officials are castigating claims from pro-immigrant groups that a federal list of 20,000 noncitizens who are potential voters is bogus.
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Two data analysts at the University of California, Los Angeles, claimed that 40 percent of the people on the federal list includes people not on the state’s voting list, according to the Associated Press, which called the UCLA claim the “first outside analysis” of the federal list.
UCLA’s Voting Rights Project, along with the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, filed a lawsuit challenging a federal request to set aside ballots from anyone on the federal list.
The Justice Department said the analysts went beyond the court-ordered action of only looking at the list to determine whether they had standing to sue, according to the Associated Press.
“The report’s political grandstanding about alleged inaccuracies that purportedly impact California voters generally, or comparisons between the government’s list and the full ‘California voter file,’ has no relevance to whether the particular plaintiffs in this case have standing,” it said.
“This is a bogus report by the activist illegal immigrant rights group CHIRLA,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli wrote on X.
“How would they know who is registered to vote and who is a citizen? They don’t (and shouldn’t) have access to any official records,” he wrote.
“It’s remarkable that the media accepts whatever these people say as gospel yet won’t report on the sworn declarations we filed in evidence confirming more than 20,000 noncitizens are suspected to be on California’s voter rolls,” he noted.
“This report also contradicts LA County’s report, which sampled 200 people on the list, all 200 of whom were re-confirmed as foreign-born aliens,” he wrote.
Essayli added in another post that “everyone on the list is a confirmed noncitizen.”
“We suspect they are all registered California voters based on the redacted voter list we obtained, requiring our own investigation to positively identify them,” he wrote, noting that if California had cooperated, the issue would have been settled.
“California could, but refuses to, provide the unredacted list, which would resolve this entire dispute in a matter of hours,” he said.
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal and is reposted with permission.
