DMV – Page 2

Making the DMV Audit a Reality

September 19, 2018 By Jim Nielsen 5 Comments

Motorists across the state have had to wait in hours-long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to register their vehicle or license renewal. Some have spent an entire day waiting in line. Upset drivers have flooded my office with calls and emails.

To make matters worse, DMV personnel mangled 23,000 voter registrations. How did this happen?

In 2015, Democrats passed the Motor Voter Law, directing the DMV to automatically register new voters, unless they choose to opt out. State Senate Republicans warned that this would be problematic. At the time, my colleagues and I expressed our concerns of adding to an already overburdened workload at the DMV. Furthermore, the DMV is the wrong venue to register new voters since this is not the agency’s area of expertise.

Three years later, we learn that tens of thousands of Californians have been registered to vote even though they did not want to be registered. The DMV also made “mistakes” that assigned some voters a different political party preference than the one they chose. We sincerely hope this was not a case of voter fraud.

Once again, the DMV is the state agency that just can’t get it right. It already has been criticized by the public for long wait times, which it blames on an antiquated computer system and the federal REAL ID law – passed in 2005 and set to be implemented by 2020.

Before the legislative session concluded in August, a group of Assembly Republicans called for an audit of the DMV. At the Joint Committee on Legislative Audit hearing, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto apologized for the long wait times, asked for more money and reassured lawmakers that the problem would be corrected by the end of the year. The request for an audit failed after some Democrats did not vote for it.

The public has lost confidence in the DMV.

It has mishandled its core mission, along with a long list of problems including the erroneous registration of voter affidavits. Something needs to be done to regain that trust. The best way to do so is for the DMV to undergo a nonpartisan audit, which would reveal the extent of its problems and suggest recommendations for fixing them.

Enough excuses. Let’s audit the DMV now.

Senator Jim Nielsen represents the 4th District in the California State Senate.

This article was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: DMV, Donald Trump, GOP, Jim Nielsen

California DMV Registers 23,000 Voters Incorrectly

September 7, 2018 By Joel B. Pollak 19 Comments

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, already under fire for excessively long lines, told Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Wednesday that it made key errors in 23,000 voter registrations filed under the state’s 2017 “motor voter” law.

In 2015, AB 60 went into effect, granting over one million illegal aliens in the Golden State the ability to apply for driver’s licenses without having their immigration status reported to federal authorities. In 2017, AB 1461, the “motor voter” law, automatically registered Californians to vote when they applied for driver’s licenses unless they were ineligible. State officials reassured the public that non-citizens would not be allowed to register to vote because database safeguards would prevent it.

The 23,000 errant applications did not include any illegal aliens, the DMV says. However, there were other crucial errors, including registering people who had opted out of registration, and registering some people with the wrong party preference.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The errors, which were discovered more than a month ago, happened when DMV employees did not clear their computer screens between customer appointments. That caused some voter information from the previous appointment, such as language preference or a request to vote by mail, to be “inadvertently merged” into the file of the next customer, Shiomoto and Tong wrote. The incorrect registration form was then sent to state elections officials, who used it to update California’s voter registration database.

A small number of the mistakes — officials estimated around 1,600 — involved people who did not intend to register to vote. State officials said no people in the country illegally — who are eligible to get a special driver’s license in California — were mistakenly registered to vote. An unknown number of errors included voters whose political party preferences were changed without their consent. Officials did not provide additional details about the errors they uncovered during a monthlong investigation.

The Associated Press reports that the state will inform voters whose details were entered incorrectly so that they can make corrections. The 23,000 flawed registrations represent a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million who have registered or updated their registrations from the beginning of 2017 through August 5, 2018.

Republican businessman John Cox, who is running against Democrat Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom for governor, has made reforming the DMV a key pledge of his campaign.

California is a key battleground in the 2018 elections, where Democrats are targeting seven Republican-held congressional seats. A few votes in each could sway the overall national result and bring back House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as Speaker of the House.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

This article was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Department of Motor Vehicles, DMV, Vote, Voting

Legislative Committee Fails on DMV Audit

August 12, 2018 By Joel Fox 12 Comments

That slow moving sloth at the DMV counter in the movie ZOOTOPIA was funny to movie goers but those who wait in a California DMV office for six, seven and even eight hours to take care of business are not laughing. A solution to the long lines was offered by the head of the DMV to a legislative committee that is the universal go-to remedy when government is failing in its responsibilities—give us more money. How about finding out how the current money is being spent? The DMV should be audited.

DMV director Jean Shiomoto requested $26 million to hire 400 more employees. She said the problem is that the federal government will soon require a Real ID license to board airplanes and for other identification purposes and explaining the change to DMV customers has slowed interactions between employees and customers at DMV facilities.

But the Real ID requirement has been known for years and the legislature has sent additional funds to the DMV to deal with the expected slowdown.

How well has that money been spent? How well is the DMV managing the resources it now has?

We may never know.

A request to audit the DMV was turned aside by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. While the required number of Assembly members approved an audit, the vote fell one shy on the Senate side when three Democratic senators abstained.

Assemblyman Jim Patterson, who requested the DMV audit, said in a statement, “The members of this committee who voted against this audit request have just sentenced California drivers to interminable wait times. The people of this state and the DMV employees have been loud and clear about the absolute failure of this department to do their job.”

Director Shiomoto opposed the audit saying it would strain agency resources and pull employees away from their jobs.

But an audit is a way to reveal the efficiency—or lack there of—of the agency. Indeed, the State Auditor’s mission statement says, “The California State Auditor promotes the efficient and effective management of public funds.”

With mounting outrage from constituents it is a prime responsibility of the legislature to promote effective use of public funds to ease the anger and to get the job done as effectively as possible.

That’s why the audit makes sense.

The problem for the DMV and many dedicated DMV employees is that they suffer from the perception offered up by that movie sloth. The only way to correct the image is to analyze the problem and produce a fix. An audit could tell us how to proceed.

Without an audit, throwing money at the problem is a great risk. Maybe that is enough to solve the problem but the track record at the DMV on improving customer service with increased dollars is not inspiring.

Joel Fox editor and co-publisher of Fox and Hounds Daily.

This article was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: DMV

MADD-Backed Ignition Interlock Mandate Wrong for California

July 19, 2016 By Sarah Longwell 5 Comments

After nearly a decade of activists working to pass a law mandating installation of ignition interlock devices (IID’s) in the cars of anyone convicted of a DUI, success appeared imminent — until a couple weeks ago.

Senate Bill 1046 has been positively flying through the Assembly — enjoying the kind of unanimous support reserved for feel-good legislation pushed by a group no one wants to oppose.

It’s almost as if Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and its allies in the Assembly hoped they could outrun the facts.

But last month, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released its “Specific Deterrent Evaluation of the Ignition Interlock Pilot Program in California,” which studied the efficacy of the interlock mandate in four California counties: Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Tulare. Much to the dismay of advocates, the DMV report did not advocate in favor of expanding the pilot program statewide.

The bottom line of the DMV report: Those who installed the devices had an increased risk of crash or fatal injury compared to those who did not.

That’s right: Instead of making the roads safer, a statewide ignition interlock mandate for all offenders would likely make drivers less safe.

It makes sense if you think about it. IID’s require the driver to not only blow into them when they start the car, but also undergo a “rolling retest” which occurs at random to ensure the driver didn’t simply have someone else blow into the device to start the car. But picking up the device when it beeps to complete a long breath test is a massive distraction — not unlike texting and driving.

But there are some in California who don’t want a small detail like public safety to get in the way of a feel-good agenda. MADD, along with the bill’s author State Senator Jerry Hill, are already looking for ways to discredit the DMV’s impartial findings.

Yet this is the second year in a row that the DMV evaluated the pilot program and refused to recommend expanding it. In 2015, the five-year pilot program was extended for an additional 18 months after the DMV found that “the IID pilot program was not associated with a reduction in the number of first-time and repeat DUI convictions in the pilot counties.”

Since proponents of expanding interlock mandates in California can’t point to empirical evidence that the law would have a net positive effect on traffic safety, they instead fall back on the fact that 26 other states have passed similar laws. What they don’t mention is how poorly the laws are working in those states.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association fewer than 20 percent of those ordered to get an interlock actually have them installed. The reason is that laws like the one proposed in California are an unfunded mandate, meaning there’s no money to ensure that offenders actually comply with the law.

That’s why ignition interlock mandates for all offenders is such misguided public policy. Over 70 percent of alcohol-related fatalities are caused by high-BAC and repeat offenders — hard-core alcohol abusers. California could save far more lives if it worked to reach 100 percent ignition interlock installation compliance among this target population, rather than expanding the mandate so widely that it is even more difficult to enforce.

But that wouldn’t serve MADD’s ultimate agenda of seeing alcohol-sensing technology installed in every car in America.

It may sound far-fetched, but MADD has long supported an ongoing federal program called DADSS (Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety) which has developed technology that can read a driver’s blood alcohol concentration level through touch technology in the steering wheel or ignition button. A drivable prototype was unveiled last year and engineers aim to have it on the market in approximately five years.

Thus, MADD is pushing hard to expand current ignition interlock laws. The more the current technology is normalized, the easier it will be to sell its more sophisticated progeny to legislators and the public.

But just because the DMV report doesn’t serve MADD’s ultimate goal, doesn’t mean we should ignore the findings.

Facts are stubborn things. And the fact is, interlock mandates for first-offenders aren’t the drunk driving panacea MADD wants them to be.

Sarah Longwell is the managing director of the American Beverage Institute.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: DMV, Drunk driving, DUI, MADD

Making the DMV Audit a Reality

California DMV Registers 23,000 Voters Incorrectly

Legislative Committee Fails on DMV Audit

MADD-Backed Ignition Interlock Mandate Wrong for California

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