Thirty thousand non-US citizens residing in Colorado were the recipients of postcards encouraging them to register to vote after the state mistakenly mailed it to them on September 27.
The office of Secretary of State Jena Griswold explained in a statement that a mailing mistake occurred after department employees compared the names of 102,000 registered voters provided by the Electronic Registration Information Center to a list containing Colorado residents who had been issued driver’s licenses.
The statement from Griswold’s office also notes that the Department of Revenue’s driver’s license database also consists of non-U.S. citizens issued with special licenses. The database, however, didn’t include formatting information that would enable the Department of State to exclude non-U.S. citizens from receiving the mailers.
Sent in English and Spanish, the postcards explain that to register to vote, residents must be 18 years or older and be U.S. citizens. The mailer also lists a set of instructions to register to vote but is not a registration form.
Griswold’s office also confirmed that it wasn’t aware of any non-U.S. citizen who had received the flyer in error attempting to register to vote, adding that if they made such an attempt, they would be denied.
Griswold’s office went on to explain that the 30,000 non-U.S. citizens who received the mailer would now receive notices explaining that they should not register to vote.
Further measures have been put in place to prevent those ineligible to vote from registering, including comparing the Social Security Numbers of each application.
