Some state voters aren’t U.S. citizens

AJC Exclusive: For years, Georgia's method of registering voters allowed some non-U.S. citizens to register and some to cast ballots.

And while state officials say they’ve fixed the problem with new voters, there’s nothing to stop noncitizens who registered before the changes from voting Tuesday.

The Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees Georgia’s voter rolls, does not know how many noncitizens are registered to vote. But state officials acknowledged there are some. And an Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Channel 2 WSB-TV investigation found noncitizens who have voted.

“It doesn’t surprise me but it does concern me, obviously,” Secretary of State Brian Kemp said in an interview after being presented with the AJC’s findings.

Stone Mountain resident Roselda Seals, 61, a native of Jamaica, acknowledged in an interview that she is a noncitizen in the country legally who has voted in Georgia elections.

“Yes I do — more than one time,” she said in a Jamaican accent.

Seals moved to the United States in 1991. She first lived in New Orleans — where she says she also was registered to vote — before moving to DeKalb County in 2002.

Seals, however, said she did not know that, as a noncitizen, it is a felony to knowingly give false information to register to vote. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “Nobody tell me, ‘You can’t vote.’ ”

Asked how she registered, Seals said she received paperwork in the mail, filled it out and turned it in.

Until recently, those registering to vote in Georgia did not have to show proof that they were citizens; they only had to sign a form swearing they were.

That changed in August, when the state got permission to verify the citizenship of all newly registered voters.

But the Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t plan to confirm the citizenship of all those currently registered. That would require permission from the U.S. Justice Department. It took two years and a lawsuit for Georgia to get approval for its program verifying the citizenship of new voters, one of the toughest in the country.

Voter verification has been a hot topic in Georgia and across the U.S. Critics of tough standards say they discourage low-income Americans from voting, but proponents say verification is needed to make sure noncitizens — including illegal immigrants — can’t vote.

Now, Georgia officials are hoping that noncitizens will be purged from the voter rolls in a variety of ways.

As of January, county election offices across the state are required to send a monthly list to the Secretary of State’s Office identifying people who were excused from jury duty because they identified themselves as noncitizens. However, about half of the state’s 159 counties have not submitted any reports this year, and most have not fully complied with the law.

Of those counties that have submitted reports, the Secretary of State’s Office has compiled a list of 68 registered voters who were identified as noncitizens during jury duty, said spokesman Matt Carrothers. Eight of those have voted, he said. The office has opened investigations into those situations, Carrothers said.

The Department of Driver Services, which registers people to vote through the Motor Voter program, also said it has closed some loopholes that likely have allowed noncitizens to become registered voters.

The noncitizens are not illegal immigrants, but foreign nationals who are in the country legally and eligible to get a Georgia driver’s license or identification card.

In past years, an unidentified number of noncitizens have been registered due to “typographical errors or misinformation [or] confusion,” said Jennifer Ammons, general counsel for DDS.

The agency has been verifying since 1994 that its customers were either citizens or legally in the country, but all customers — citizens or not — were being asked whether they wanted to register to vote.

“The system basically was geared so that the burden was on the customer to know whether he or she should answer that question,” Ammons said.

As of 2006, DDS stopped asking noncitizens that question.

Earlier this year, at a State Elections Board meeting, Ammons was taken to task for her agency’s problems, which were first highlighted in a WSB-TV report.

“DDS is a good partner with us,” Kemp said. “But when they don’t have good processes, we also need to let them know about that.”

In a follow-up investigation from WSB-TV’s report, the Secretary of State’s Office discovered at least 10 registered voters who were not citizens. Of those, two had voted.

The office also discovered another trend: Most had been registered to vote by DDS.

And the noncitizens tracked down by the Secretary of State’s Office said that “they either did not understand or did not intend to register to vote.”

The AJC and WSB conducted an investigation of their own.

In trying to identify possible noncitizen voters, the AJC analyzed two sets of data: the names of people booked into metro Atlanta jails who were identified as noncitizens by jail personnel; and the names of people who have been excused from jury duty because they identified themselves as non-citizens. The AJC then compared that data — thousands of names — to the current voter rolls to see if there were matches.

The data showed at least 700 noncitizens may be registered to vote in Georgia and, of those, about 250 have actually voted.

However, the information supplied by courts and jails — some of which is being supplied to the Secretary of State’s Office — may not be entirely reliable.

Of 25 or so people from the lists contacted by the AJC for this story, only two were clearly not U.S. citizens. The rest not only said they were citizens, but most furnished birth certificates, passports or naturalization papers that supported their claims.

The chances of noncitizens becoming registered from now on are slim to none, according to the Secretary of State’s Office and DDS.

But there are still holes in the both agencies’ systems.

At DDS, those renewing their driver’s licenses still don’t have to show proof they’re citizens — only new customers do. That could change by May 2011, the earliest possible start date of a new federal law requiring all people who are renewing their licenses to prove they’re citizens. Until then, DDS will continue to take their word for it.

Once that federal law takes effect, it will take DDS eight years to verify that all the people in its system are, in fact, citizens of this country.

And at the Secretary of State’s Office, if noncitizens who are currently registered to vote don’t get flagged by the jury duty reports — or are somehow reported to election officials — they can continue to vote in Georgia elections.

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to investigate this story. Watch Channel 2's interviews with noncitizens who registered to vote and with Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

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