By Illinois Radio Network

SPRINGFIELD – An Illinois state senator raised concerns in 2016 that Illinois’ automatic voter registration program could mistakenly give voter cards to people who weren’t U.S. citizens.

At the time, lawmakers were gearing up to override former Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of Senate Bill 250 in November 2016. The bill passed nearly unanimously and was overridden in a similar roll call. One of the few dissenters was state Sen. Dan McConchie, who sent out a news release that predicted a problem with automatic voter registration.

“This legislation is very problematic,” the Hawthorne Hills Republican said. “Under this proposal, non-citizens will be automatically registered to vote and then perhaps later removed from the rolls. If a non-citizen is registered and the state fails to remove that person in a timely fashion, they will get a voter card in the mail and likely believe they can legally vote. And if they do vote, they will be committing a felony.”

That has since happened. More than 500 people who indicated they weren’t U.S. citizens were improperly registered to vote and more than a dozen of those people voted in 2018.

Now, McConchie said the government’s mistake could get people deported, even those in the country on work visas.

“The federal government could look at that and say ‘you’ve violated federal law and we’re going to deport you,’ ” he said. “It’s a scary thing for anybody who’s in this country legally but is not yet a citizen.”

Officials from the Secretary of State’s office are set to attend a legislative hearing on automatic voter registration Thursday morning.

Some lawmakers have called for the automatic voter registration program to be suspended pending an investigation. The Secretary of State’s office has said the programming error has already been fixed.

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