The California Department of Motor Vehicles says it will implement new quality control on its voter registration process after last week's revelation that as many as 1,500 non-citizens were wrongly registered to vote.
In a letter sent Friday to Secretary of State Alex Padilla, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto and California Department of Technology Director Amy Tong said the new measures "will ensure that only those persons who have attested to their eligibility to vote under California law are transmitted to your office."
DMV officials said they will begin checking representative samples of voter registration documents to ensure accuracy before those applications are processed.
"If any error or inconsistency is discovered, it will be thoroughly investigated and immediately addressed before any transmission of information,” Shiomoto and Tong wrote.
State finance officials also announced they will expand their existing audit of DMV operations to include the new "motor voter" program that went online in the spring.
In three separate incidents, officials have had to disclose significant errors in correctly identifying who is eligible to vote or a voter’s political party preference.
Padilla's Republican challenger in the Nov. 6 election, Mark Meuser, has sought to make the DMV errors a staple of the campaign.
Padilla has said he would be willing to suspend implementation of the motor voter program if needed while the errors were investigated.
"We’re doing the homework as we speak of what does that mean and what it would take,” Padilla said at a news conference after the latest revelations. “These mistakes from the DMV are absolutely unacceptable.”
The DMV reported last month that it made 23,000 voter registration errors resulting from technicians toggling between multiple screens and having registration information improperly merged.
In May, the Los Angeles Times reported that a software error affected 77,000 voter records generated at the DMV.
