Republican Kim Wyman’s call for “citizenship checks” of voters draws swift condemnation

Incum­bent Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman made it known this morn­ing that, if reelect­ed, she will be ask­ing the Leg­is­la­ture to enact leg­is­la­tion to at least par­tial­ly imple­ment the pri­va­cy-infring­ing fed­er­al “REAL ID” Act in order to “check for cit­i­zen­ship of peo­ple who want to reg­is­ter and vote in Washington”.

“Our pack­age is rea­son­able; it’s long over­due,” Wyman said in a news release. “Our laws are not work­ing the way they need them to. We need to con­struct laws and process­es to ver­i­fy vot­er eli­gi­bil­i­ty on the front end of the vot­er reg­is­tra­tion appli­ca­tion. We are here today to pro­pose some sen­si­ble and con­crete solu­tions to cor­rect this prob­lem. The time for action is now.”

“Peo­ple are under­stand­ably frus­trat­ed about this sit­u­a­tion and we are frus­trat­ed as well. It’s time for action in the Jan­u­ary ses­sion,” she added.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger Tina Pod­lodows­ki prompt­ly blast­ed Wyman’s announcement.

“Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman is show­ing her true par­ti­san Repub­li­can col­ors in an effort to score polit­i­cal points on vot­ing access issues,” Pod­lodows­ki said in response to Wyman’s announce­ment. “Like her party’s pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, Don­ald Trump, she is inten­tion­al­ly inflam­ing anti-immi­grant sen­ti­ments by sug­gest­ing non-cit­i­zens are try­ing to vote in Wash­ing­ton State.”

“As a daugh­ter of two immi­grants who became nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zens, I’m appalled by how low Kim Wyman is will­ing to stoop to try and paint immi­grants in Wash­ing­ton State as per­pet­u­a­tors of vot­er fraud, a con­tin­u­ing Repub­li­can nar­ra­tive in the 2016 elec­tion that is sim­ply not true. Shame on her.”

OneAm­er­i­ca’s Rich Stolz also strong­ly denounced Wyman’s posturing.

“We are appalled at Sec­re­tary Wyman’s Trump-style exploita­tion of the Burling­ton tragedy to win polit­i­cal points,” Stolz said in a state­ment sent to NPI. “With the Burling­ton inves­ti­ga­tion still under­way, and even after news reports had con­firmed that Arcan Cetin was in fact a cit­i­zen, Sec­re­tary Wyman this morn­ing announced pol­i­cy pro­pos­als tak­en out of the right-wing vot­er sup­pres­sion playbook.”

“As Sec­re­tary Wyman acknowl­edged her­self, the penal­ties for non-cit­i­zen vot­ing are severe — up to five years in prison, a $10,000 fine and like­ly deportation.”

“Instead of propos­ing poli­cies that weak­en our Democ­ra­cy by plac­ing unnec­es­sary bar­ri­ers between cit­i­zens and their right to vote, Wyman should focus on ensur­ing that the upcom­ing elec­tion revers­es the trend — under her lead­er­ship — of dwin­dling vot­er turnout,” Stolz added. (Analy­sis pub­lished by NPI shows that vot­er turnout has been con­sis­tent­ly falling dur­ing Wyman’s tenure as Sec­re­tary of State.)

The ACLU of Wash­ing­ton, which has long been a lead­ing advo­cate for the right to pri­va­cy in the Ever­green State, reg­is­tered its oppo­si­tion as well.

“The ACLU of Wash­ing­ton is dis­ap­point­ed in the Sec­re­tary of State’s pro­pos­al, which is a solu­tion look­ing for a prob­lem,” said Shankar Narayan, ACLU of Wash­ing­ton Tech­nol­o­gy and Project Direc­tor. “There is no cred­i­ble evi­dence of non-cit­i­zens vot­ing in Wash­ing­ton — such actions are already a felony in Wash­ing­ton and could lead to an indi­vid­ual being deport­ed. Rather than adding lay­ers of bureau­cra­cy that will deter legit­i­mate vot­ers or false­ly stig­ma­tiz­ing immi­grants, our pub­lic offi­cials should be mak­ing the bal­lot more, rather than less, accessible.”

“Com­man­deer­ing state dri­vers’ licens­es to become de fac­to nation­al ID cards is an expen­sive pro­pos­al that would rely on flawed fed­er­al data­bas­es. Doing so would not improve pub­lic safe­ty and would add need­less bur­den to the process of get­ting a license. Wash­ing­ton can do bet­ter than this flawed pol­i­cy,” Narayan commented.

Leg­is­la­tors have already been dis­cussing how and whether to respond to the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty’s lat­est man­u­fac­tured dead­lines for com­ply­ing with pro­vi­sions of the more than decade-old REAL ID Act.

“Bipar­ti­san work on REAL ID has been under­way in the Leg­is­la­ture for sev­er­al years – led by House Speak­er Frank Chopp, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Judy Clib­born and Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Cur­tis King – with leg­is­la­tion already sched­uled to be intro­duced in the 2017 Ses­sion,” Pod­lodows­ki observed.

“The con­ver­sa­tion on REAL ID and Auto­mat­ic Vot­er Reg­is­tra­tion has been devel­op­ing with Wyman sit­ting on the side­lines. Only now, after a recent tragedy, is she step­ping for­ward to score polit­i­cal points.”

The afore­men­tioned tragedy is the mass mur­der of five peo­ple at Cas­cade Mall in Burling­ton: Sarai Lara (16), Chuck Eagan (61), Belin­da Galde (64), Beat­rice Dot­son (95), Galde’s moth­er, and Shay­la Mar­tin (52). In the wake of the shoot­ing, news media ques­tioned whether sus­pect­ed per­pe­tra­tor Arcan Cetin (who has con­fessed to the mur­ders) was in fact an Amer­i­can citizen.

In our view, Wyman and her team inap­pro­pri­ate­ly used Cetin’s ter­ri­ble crime and the report­ing sur­round­ing it as fod­der for their news release.

The release quotes Wyman is saying:

“This issue pales in com­par­i­son to the tragedy of five inno­cent lives lost. But when the cit­i­zen­ship of Mr. Cetin was pub­licly called into ques­tion as part of the sto­ry, it shined a bright light on the fact that under cur­rent state law, as elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors, we are not able to con­firm the cit­i­zen­ship of any reg­is­tered voter.”

This issue does­n’t have any­thing to do with what hap­pened in Burlington.

NPI believes our response to Wash­ing­ton’s declin­ing vot­er turnout needs to include elim­i­nat­ing bar­ri­ers to vot­ing, not cre­at­ing new ones.

Wyman’s news release today improp­er­ly con­flates sev­er­al issues — specif­i­cal­ly, the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s man­u­fac­tured REAL ID dead­lines and Wash­ing­ton’s response, the accu­ra­cy and integri­ty of the state’s vot­er rolls, and what needs to be done to effec­tive­ly imple­ment auto­mat­ic vot­er registration.

Wyman’s call for “cit­i­zen­ship checks” sounds akin to a pho­to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion scheme for Wash­ing­ton State. Wash­ing­ton is most­ly vote by mail, with only a few acces­si­ble vot­ing cen­ters, so Repub­li­cans can’t argue we need a law that would require vot­ers to present cer­tain forms of pho­to ID at polling places.

But Kim Wyman is now argu­ing that “elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors” like her need to be able to ver­i­fy if a vot­er is in fact a citizen.

Why? As far as the rights of nat­ur­al per­sons are con­cerned, guilty until proven inno­cent is incom­pat­i­ble with the val­ues our coun­try was found­ed on.

Our ini­tial response to hear­ing this pro­pos­al was to ask some ques­tions, namely:

1. Which pro­vi­sions of the REAL ID Act of 2005 are you propos­ing to com­ply with? (The law has a trou­bled his­to­ry and its imple­men­ta­tion is very incom­plete, hav­ing been repeat­ed­ly delayed.)
2. What is the estimated/approximate cost of your pro­posed legislation?
3. How will it be paid for?
4. Are you actu­al­ly prepar­ing a draft of agency request leg­is­la­tion, or are you going to defer to part­ner leg­is­la­tors to work on that?
5. What do you say to those who con­tend full adoption/implementation of REAL ID could vio­late the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights guar­an­teed to Wash­ing­to­ni­ans by the Wash­ing­ton State Constitution?

Wyman’s staff did not offer answers to these ques­tions, except to say that Wyman antic­i­pates work­ing with Judy Clib­born and Cur­tis King, the respec­tive cur­rent chairs of the House and Sen­ate Trans­porta­tion Com­mit­tees, on this legislation.

(That’s assum­ing that vot­ers pre­serve the sta­tus quo in Olympia. The par­ties are bat­tling furi­ous­ly for con­trol over both cham­bers. Repub­li­cans’ hopes of win­ning both have large­ly fad­ed, while Democ­rats are embold­ened about expand­ing their House major­i­ty and elect­ing a major­i­ty in the Sen­ate as well.)