Lawyers Democracy Fund's board member Joanne Young published an op-ed today cataloguing the many problems with California's automatic, or mandatory, voter registration system, which is especially relevant as the House debates and votes on H.R. 1 this week.  H.R. 1 would require all states to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR) according to the bill's requirements, regardless of each state's existing laws.  It would also require a massive data dump from various government databases in the states' voter registration systems, which would introduce errors in the voter registration databases that would only be exacerbated by the new required AVR systems.

California has agreed via settlement to investigate its DMV's latest mishandling of voter registration information:

On Dec. 14, DMV officials revealed that staff members had not transmitted voter registration files for 589 people whose applications or updated applications were filled out before the close of registration for the Nov. 6 statewide election. At the time, state officials could not confirm whether any of those voters had been turned away on election day, or if any had cast last-minute provisional ballots that were rejected in the final tally.

Monday’s settlement raises the possibility that a full investigation of the delayed voter registration documents could reveal races in which the outcome might have changed had those voters been allowed to participate. State officials now have 60 days to complete an investigation into the identity of those voters and why DMV staff members failed to transmit the files in a timely fashion.

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. 

California's mandatory (automatic) voter registration system, which launched in April, has been plagued by problems.  First, two registration forms were created for each of 77,000 voters due to a "software error."  Then, over 23,000 voters had errors placed in their voter registration records due to an "administrative processing error" after a visit to the DMV.  Now, 1,500 people have been wrongly registered to vote by the DMV, including at least some non-citizens, due to errors made by employees during data entry: