Francis D. Siciliano, Anti-American and DHS Stooge

IN SANTA CLARA, CALIFAS, voter registration was rising dramatically as a result of bringing the two processes of naturalization and training for voter registration together. 

It was a procedure that produced a bumper crop of new voters:

Just before Santa Clara County immigrants were sworn in as U.S. citizens, they got voter-registration cards and were shown how to fill them out. At the conclusion of the naturalization ceremony, most new citizens had signed the cards and handed them in to become registered voters. 

This was so successful that other cities in California began to model their naturalization processes after Santa Clara. And you’d think, in a sane world, that new citizens of the USA—completely “legal” and with every right to vote and to the court systems and to the protections that you and I share—would be celebrated for voting.

And it is. Unless you are the Republican Department of ICE an—oh, wait, I mean the Department of Homeland Security. Because they seemed to find it reasonable to forbid even handing these people a damn voter registration card before they swear their final oath.

But in March, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declared that the county registrar of voters must not hand out those cards until the recipients are officially citizens. And now voter registration has plunged by 82 percent.

“Everybody’s really disappointed,” said Diane Moore, precinct operations division manager for the county registrar’s office. “Before this processing change, we were one of the models in the state of California. We did this with a great amount of pride.”

—County voter drive blocked - FEWER NEW CITIZENS REGISTERED AFTER U.S. AGENCY CHANGES RULE

The local League of Women Voters, along with local congressional representatives are furious.

“Homeland Security has no jurisdiction over this. They can’t limit voter registration,” said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee. “Who do they think they are?”

Okay, so no big deal, right? Just hand them the card after the swearing in and the entire process has run its course. Right? Start that new lesson afterward, after the long, arduous, exciting, nerve wracking event comes to a full close. Then begin a new training course.

With new citizens unable to fill out the cards at their own pace during the ceremony, registrar workers found it nearly impossible to catch the new citizens as they rushed toward the door after the ceremony to get back to jobs or to family obligations.

Plus, one Citizenship and Immigration Services staffer has been “telling new citizens to leave the building while they are still filling out their voter registration cards,” according to an internal county memo obtained by the Mercury News.

So did the little Republican-DHS trick work?

The impact was definitive: The county registered 3,140 new voters at naturalization ceremonies in the four months before the new policy went into effect, but only 557 new voters registered in the four months since. Registrars signed up as many as 65 percent of new citizens before the change, but just 8 percent registered at the most recent ceremony in June.

The Republicans must be so proud! Whether its rigging elections, invading nations, lying to the US populace, dismissing the Nuremburg decision and the Geneva Conventions, outing CIA agents or dissuading brand new American Citizens from exercising one of the most important rights (ideally) you can exercise as an official US citizen, Republicans sure know how to piss all over the United States Flag. Subversives and anarchists oughtta take note. Nobody shreds the laws, ideals, and rights decreed by USGOV like a Republican!

Santa Clara County officials say they were notified March 19 in a telephone call from Francis D. Siciliano, then-director of the agency’s San Jose field office, that a lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security was forcing the change.

Siciliano, who retired July 3, said in an interview Friday that he had received a memo from his superiors in Washington, D.C., saying it would be inappropriate for citizens-to-be to receive registration materials until they had actually taken the oath of citizenship.

“It was a technicality,” he said, but added that he couldn’t recall which official in Washington sent the memo, or who had filed the lawsuit that prompted it.

He said politics were not involved. “None whatsoever, to be very honest with you,” he said.

—County voter drive blocked - FEWER NEW CITIZENS REGISTERED AFTER U.S. AGENCY CHANGES RULE

Yes, I’m told that Mister Siciliano has a sterling reputation for honesty. And the White House is never motivated by politics. And George W Bush is intelligent and Karl Rove attractive and John McCain has integrity and Dick Cheney has a human heart.

They want us to die in their wars first. And vote last, if ever.

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UPDATE Aug 11: Justice is served.