A very interesting Wall Street Journal article on how stringent Motor Voter laws, mistakes by local DMV bureaucracies, and the lack of citizenship ID verification mistakenly register legal resident aliens to voter rolls.  The result is years of deportation hearings and litigation over the potential felony. Just imagine what “automatic registration” would do exacerbate the issue of “mistaken registration.”

Excerpts from the piece:

Both sides of the debate present compelling arguments: Requiring proof
of citizenship would no doubt guard against voter fraud but could also
inconvenience or deter legitimate voters. Yet witnessing firsthand how
Motor Voter registration plays out for immigrants in Illinois and
Indiana—like the scenario described earlier—I have come to see how a law
like Arizona’s, or at least some validation process, might be good for
noncitizen immigrant

….A legal mechanism requiring proof of citizenship for voter
registration—such as Arizona’s Prop. 200 or some other validation
process—would have saved Ms. Keathley and our overburdened courts years
of grief. One hopes the Supreme Court takes cases like hers into
consideration when ruling on Prop. 200 and the alleged supremacy of the
federal Motor Voter law.