California DMV mishandles 23,000 voter registrations

Jean Shiomoto, the state’s DMV director, and Amy Tong, director of the California Department of Technology, described the problem as “an administrative processing error” in a letter to Secretary of State Alex Padilla, California’s chief elections officer.

“We are committed to getting this right and are working closely with the Secretary of State’s office to correct the errors that occurred,” Shiomoto said in a written statement. Tong declined to comment beyond the letter.

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.