Anyone who registers to vote in California sees this right away:
Q. Am I eligible to vote?
Yes, if you are a U.S. citizen at least 18 years of age by Election Day a resident of California registered at least 15 days before the election not in prison or on parole for the conviction of a felony, and not currently judged mentally incompetent by a court of law. You must be registered in order to vote and to sign petitions placing initiatives on the ballot.
A legal resident of the U.S., who never became a citizen and obviously knew she was ineligible, registered to vote and voted in 2004. Yet the Associated Press’ headline reads: Unwitting woman votes, faces deportation. Here’s their sad version of the story:
All of her life, Zoila Meyer believed she was an American. She even won election to the City Council of Adelanto. But now she is facing a threat of deportation for illegally voting, because she never became a citizen after being brought to this country from Cuba when she was 1 year old.
“To be honest with you, I’m scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?” the 40-year-old mother of four said in a telephone interview Friday. “If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody,” she said.
After Meyer was elected to the council in Adelanto in 2004, someone told officials that she was born in Cuba, prompting an investigation. Eventually, “the police came to me and said, ‘Zoila, you’re not a citizen. You’re a legal resident but you’re not a citizen,”‘ said Meyer, who now lives in the San Bernardino County desert town of Apple Valley, near Adelanto.
…
Meyer, whose story was first reported in the Victorville Daily Press, applied to become a naturalized citizen and continued with her life[emphasis added mine]: raising her children and attending two local colleges to earn degrees toward her goal of working in the justice system as a forensic nurse.However, because she was not a citizen, Meyer faced a felony charge of illegally voting in the 2004 election. In April 2006, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voting and was placed on probation, fined and ordered to pay restitution.
What Meyer didn’t realize is that fraudulently voting is a deportable offense. On June 18 [emphasis added mine], Meyer said, immigration officials showed up at her home and told her to appear at their San Bernardino office. Her husband drove her to the office on Tuesday, “and they handcuffed me,” Meyer said. “They put me in jail and they frisked me and processed me.”
They arrested and punished her because she illegally voted under California law yet that was also a federal election. It is highly unlikely an immigration judge will void her legal residency and order her deportation to Canada, a country she has only visited, and they will never deport her to Cuba. I am not surprised by AP’s gripping rendition of her story.
The timing of Zoila Meyer’s arrest by immigration officers strikes me as odd, June 18, just as Senator Majority Lead Reid again introduced immigration “reform.” And the AP apparently failed to discover how a non-citizen managed to register to vote in California.
While California law requires a person to show legal status to obtain a driver’s license or identification card, citizenship is not required and either can be shown when you register to vote there:
…after January 1, 2006 is now required to include on their voter registration affidavit their California driver’s license number, if they have a current and valid driver’s license, or their California identification card number, if they have one, or, if they have neither a driver’s license nor a California ID, the last four digits of their Social Security number, if they have a Social Security card. If a person does not possess a driver’s license, state-issued identification card or a Social Security card, he or she will still become a registered voter. But, if they do have this information, they must provide it. Any person voting for the first time who registers by mail who does not provide this information will be asked to show a form of identification when he or she goes to the polls, or to provide a copy of that identification with his or her absentee ballot. There are 30 forms of identification that can be used for this purpose under HAVA, including a government issued check or a utility bill that includes the person’s name and address.
There is one more requirement:
Question: How can a person prove his or her citizenship? Answer: California Elections Code Section 2111 states, “A person may prove he or she is a citizen by his or her certification under penalty of perjury on the affidavit of registration (for voter registration purposes only).”
In other words, if you not a citizen and even if you do not have state ID or a Social Security card, you can still register to vote in California by just showing a utility bill and lying. That is good news for all those illegals in California who will not be eligible for a Z-visa: they will still be able to vote in the United States. And for all those eligible, a lie and that Social Security card you get after you are legalized if the immigration bill before the Senate becomes law will surfice. No one is going to deport you for voting, just because you defied the laws of the United States.