As Election Day comes closer, it is worth noting the many problems facing election officials.  These “problems” are often a combination of election official incompetence and bad actors.   What’s worse is they do not increase turnout, their stated purpose. 

One example is the left's push for automatic or mandatory voter registration.  This process has the effect of disenfranchising voters from party primaries (thus helping establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton over insurgent candidates like Bernie Sanders) whether intentionally or unintentionally.  Mandatory registration cannot select a party for a person and serves to disfranchise more casual voters who only vote every four years in party primaries for President or the like. 

But it gets worse.  Mandatory voter registration, if improperly set up, can also disenfranchise those already registered as was disclosed last month in California:

The California Department of Motor Vehicles’ acknowledgement this week that it botched 23,000 voter registrations is raising new questions about whether it can be trusted to register voters at a time when election integrity is under renewed scrutiny nationwide.

The DMV acknowledged in a letter Wednesday to Secretary of State Alex Padilla that “administrative processing” errors had affected motor voter data sent to his office. The DMV said it found about 23,000 errors in 1.4 million records sent to the secretary of state’s office between April 23 and Aug. 5. . . . The DMV said the errors were caused when staff technicians had more than one person’s record open on their computer screens at the same time. Somehow, the agency said, those records “were inadvertently merged.”

This is not the only problem that mandatory voter registration has caused in California.  Later it was disclosed people were not being allowed to opt out of mandatory registration:

Officials at California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday that an additional 3,000 people were mistakenly signed up to vote during the rollout of the state’s new “motor voter” program, errors made during the spring and summer and part of a larger batch of problems first reported two weeks ago. . . . [This] doubles the instances in which customers unsuccessfully tried to opt out of registering to vote, the DMV said.

We are not done yet, as Sacramento's ABC Station reported in an article entitled: California election official can't say if non-citizens voted:

California's top elections official said Tuesday he doesn't yet know if any of the roughly 1,500 people mistakenly registered to vote by the Department of Motor Vehicles cast ballots in the June primary. . . .

People were mistakenly registered through no fault of their own, Padilla said, and his office is removing them from the voter rolls.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla is not alone in these registration problems.  Pennsylvania Democrat Secretary of State Pedro Cortes resigned after it was uncovered that non-citizens were registered and voting.  While Padilla should do that, he has at least acknowledged the problems with mandatory voter registration:

At the center of the controversy is California’s new Motor Voter program, which automatically registers eligible voters who visit the D.M.V. to renew or replace their drivers’ licenses. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Mr. Padilla said that freezing the program, which began this year, was “certainly on the table.”

Another alternative is voting Secretary Padilla out of office and/or repealing mandatory voter registration.  RNLA Member Mark Meuser is running against Secretary Padilla this November.