My amendment also requires the Attorney General to conduct a study on voting fraud in those jurisdictions which will be required to provide minority language assistance under the Simon bill. The report should determine if multilingual voting assistance has been used or Implicated in efforts to violate other laws. particularly laws requiring the use of documentary identification and citizenship as a requirement for votingsuch as voter registration. There have been several instances where voter registration materials were. or may have been used to register noncitizens to vote. The most notable one occurred in San Francisco where U.S. Attorney Russoniello conducted an investigation of bilingual ballot users. on the information that many were noncitizens. Russoniello received information that persons registering the noncitizens had told the potential. but ineligible. voters that they were. in fact. eligible to vote if they were married to a U.S. citizen (which only gets you a green card. if you apply to the INS) or if they had lived in the United States a long time (which never is a guarantee of citizenship). Also. the Spanish translation of the registration form erroneously stated that a registrant should be rather than must be a citizen. The investigation revealed that 27 percent of the persons examined proved to be noncitizens. 40 percent had no records so that citizenship could not be determined. and only 32 percent were. in fact. citizens. (The investigation was terminated without further resolution.) The San Francisco investigation. and another in Chicago. at the very least tell us that we should be monitoring the possible misuse of bilingual voting assistance materials. My amendment starts that monitoring process. Finally. the proponents argue that we extend this program for 15 years so that it ends at the same time several other programs in the Voting Rights Act expire.
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noncitizens green card