INDIANAPOLIS (NETWORK INDIANA) — We are 25 days away from Election Day. The deadline to register to vote has come and gone and the voter rolls are set in stone for when thousands of Hoosiers are expected to vote.
Many have already voted by engaging in early voting.
With all this in mind, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Secretary of State Diego Morales are asking for some clarification on the immigration status of 585,774 registered voters. They sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on October 11th requesting the information.
The information requested has to do with many Hoosiers who registered to vote without providing a driver’s license number, were overseas, or registered without providing either a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.
Some legal experts say that depending on what both men intend to do with the data, if USCIS provides it to the, if could be a violation of state and federal law.
“Back in the day when I registered you weren’t required to submit a driver’s license license. You weren’t required to submit a social security number. So I could very well be on this list,” said Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana.
“I think the major concern I have as a voter is that they have transmitted some pretty personal information about hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers,” she added.
There have been similar requests made by attorneys general and secretaries of state from other states like in Alabama and Virginia. Both efforts have run into legal challenges. In Indiana’s case, legal challenges are unlikely unless there is an effort made to remove people from the voter registration list.
State and federal law both say that registered voters cannot be removed from voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
“We are well within that period, so any kind of voter deletions are not allowed between now and the election,” said Chris Daley, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana. “It’s so clear that there is no point to what the Attorney General and the Secretary of State are doing. It’s clearly a political stunt.”
Secretary of State Diego Morales said in an emailed statement that their inquiry to USCIS “is not an effort to remove registrations from the voter registration list.” He added they are responding to requests made by county clerks across the state who are raising concerns about the number of absentee ballots from overseas voters.
