RNLA Vice President for Communications and 2018 Republican Lawyer of the Year Harmeet Dhillon, along with RNLA member Mark Meuser, is once again standing up for election integrity and the rule of law in California.  They filed a request for declaratory and indicative relief in the Eastern District of California today alleging that Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla's failure to use available resources to confirm that people are U.S. citizens prior to registering them to vote violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA):

The California Secretary of State owes a duty to the residents of California to ensure the integrity of California elections by making sure that only United States citizens who are eligible to vote, are placed on the voter rolls and receive balloting materials.

In direct violation of his duties to ensure that only eligible voters are placed on the voter rolls, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla has established a pattern and practice of doing nothing to verify that a potential voter is a United States citizen, thus causing non-citizens to be placed on the voter rolls.

The Secretary of State has forsaken his duty to ensure that non-citizens are never placed on the voter rolls, and has relegated his office to that of a glorified clerk simply transmitting the data from the voter registration application to the counties for data entry purposes. . . .

In addition to the Secretary of State abdicating his duty to verify eligibility of all voters, the Department of Motor Vehicles does not transmit to the Secretary of State’s office the information that enables the Secretary of State to assess the eligibility of the applicant.

The entire complaint can be viewed here.  California's error-riddled mandatory voter registration program revealed California's failure to confirm citizenship:

A federal lawsuit filed by attorney Harmeet Dhillon comes after a state audit found the California DMV’s “motor voter” program that started last year was riddled with technical problems that led to hundreds of thousands of discrepancies in voter registrations. Dhillon said that audit helped bring issues raised in her lawsuit to light.

The lawsuit alleges that California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and the director of California’s DMV, Steve Gordon, have violated the National Voter Registration Act and that Padilla has “forsaken his duty to ensure that non-citizens” are kept off voter rolls. She said the lawsuit does not allege voter fraud but that the state is neglecting one of its duties as outlined by the voter act.

“It is important for the sanctity of our elections that only people who are entitled to vote, which for federal elections means citizens, be allowed to vote,” Dhillon said at a news conference.

Dhillon said all three are Republican voters but that the lawsuit was nonpartisan. The plaintiffs “feel passionately that the right to vote should be restricted to citizens only, as the law requires,” she said.

Thanks to Ms. Dhillon and Mr. Meuser for defending the integrity of elections in California.