Noncitizen who disrupted ICE charged with illegally registering to vote

Read that headline twice to make sure it wasn't a repeat. It wasn't. This is the same guy, the same county apparently, going from physically obstructing federal immigration officers to allegedly filling out a voter registration form he had no legal right to sign. Two separate brushes with the law, two different systems, one common thread: nobody checked.

That's the part that should bother people more than it does. Registering to vote in California doesn't require proof of citizenship at the point of registration. You attest, you sign, and the state takes your word for it under penalty of perjury. Perjury is a fine deterrent for people who plan on staying and building a life within the system. It does nothing for someone who's already shown he's willing to physically interfere with federal enforcement operations. The honor system only works on people inclined to be honorable about it.

Prosecutors deserve credit for actually filing the charge instead of quietly correcting the registration and moving on, which is often how these things get handled. But the fact that it takes an arrest and a court docket to catch something a basic ID check at registration would have caught instantly tells you the safeguard isn't a safeguard. It's a formality.

None of this requires assuming bad intent from every immigrant or every county clerk. It just requires admitting that a self-attestation system has exactly one enforcement mechanism, and that mechanism is "hope nobody lies." This case is what happens when somebody does.