Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales and Attorney General Todd Rokita are questioning the citizenship of more than half a million registered voters about three weeks before Election Day.
Republican leaders requested that the federal government authenticate voters’ citizenship status in a letter with their names and birth dates.
Morales and Rokita are questioning 585,774 registered voters in three categories: those who registered without submitting a driver’s license or Social Security number, registered voters who live overseas, and those who registered merely without a driver’s license number.
You can register to vote on paper without a driver’s license or Social Security number under federal and state law. In such a case, first-time voters would have to produce proof of residency for their vote to be counted.
Furthermore, many voters who live overseas are military personnel.
Under federal law, counties cannot remove people from voter rolls if the federal government flags them as non-citizens.
There are also questions about whether state law allows Morales and Rokita to share voters’ birth dates with federal authorities.
According to Indiana Democratic Party Chair Mike Schmuhl, the letter is a “Republican stunt to question the legitimacy of the election if they don’t like the results.”
