The Trump administration says it is cracking down on alleged voter fraud as the Department of Homeland Security begins investigating allegations in nine states, including California, using a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n
DHS has already pushed states to share their voter rolls for audit and promised to withhold federal grant funding unless they adopt a new set of guidelines. Those guidelines include doing away with certain electronic voting systems, switching to hand-marked paper ballots and running voter rolls through DHS\u2019s citizen verification database.<\/p>\n
In Kern County, Auditor-Controller County Clerk Amy Espinoza addressed the county\u2019s voting process at Tuesday\u2019s Board of Supervisors meeting, emphasizing that the county\u2019s system is not connected to outside networks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Kern County system is not connected to any other system, no internet or anything,\u201d Espinoza said.<\/p>\n
Espinoza said the county\u2019s voting system counts ballots as they are tabulated.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur voting system is counting as it’s tabulating the ballots. We do a 1% manual tally., every single election, 1% of the votes cast,” Espinoza said. We hand count those and then we compare them to the results out of our voting system. And that is a state requirement.”<\/p>\n
She also addressed the possibility of error, saying the county would recount if needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there’s any discrepancies, which there has not been…we’ve gone back and recounted and it’s been human error. It’s a very tedious process,\u201d Espinoza said.<\/p>\n
A request for comment to the Kern County voter registrar\u2019s office was not immediately returned because the registrar was out of the office. A request for comment to the governor\u2019s office had not yet received an official statement.<\/p>\n
In addition to California, DHS is investigating alleged voter fraud in Washington, Nevada, Missouri, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. The investigations are expected to take place from early September to mid-October.<\/p>\n
The California Secretary of State\u2019s Office is rejecting claims that non-citizens are registered to vote, saying in part: <\/p>\n
\u201cCalifornia already has a system of checks designed to verify the identity of voters. …They must attest under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens and eligible to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
The office also asserts that these requirements fully comply with federal law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration says it is cracking down on alleged voter fraud as the Department of Homeland Security…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-451999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}