I don't use the word "lie" lightly, but I think it applies here.

First, some background. Ventura County Congressman Elton Gallegly supports E-Verify, which runs social security numbers through a federal database to determine if a worker is authorized to work in this country.

Pro-illegal-immigrant groups are running radios ads on Spanish-language stations criticizing Gallegly and others for advocating this common-sense program. According to the Star:

SEIU and America's Voice Education Fund, which supports comprehensive immigration reform, are the two organizations behind the ad campaign. A similar ad will appear in La Opinion, the nation's largest Spanish-language newspaper.

Immigration supporters and others argue that requiring employers to use E-Verify to check the backgrounds of potential workers would have a huge impact on Latinos in California and across the country.

Before we delve into the lie that America's Voice Education Fund is perpetuating, I can't let this slip by without comment--"immigration supporters" oppose Gallegly? Does that make him anti-immigration? Or is he only anti-illegal-immigration?  Let's not forget there's a difference between those two, people.

I digress. America's Voice Education Fund--what a pleasant name, by the way--"supports comprehensive immigration reform," which is a euphemism for amnesty.  Here's the group's problem with Gallegly:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, has filed legislation mandating the use of E-Verify, even though a government report last year found errors and other problems with the program. Gallegly is a co-sponsor of the bill, which cleared the Judiciary Committee last week and is now headed to the House floor for a vote.

Gallegly is a co-sponsor of an E-Verify bill, and a government report "found errors and other problems with the program."

What kind of errors, you might ask? America's Voice's website blares, "E-Verify has 50% Failure Rate, Throws Hundreds of Thousands of Legal Workers Out of a Job."

A 50% fail rate, huh? According to the government, it has a 96% success rate. Who's right?

This is where the lie comes in, but it's important to see how tricky America's Voice is.

93.1% of E-Verify's results correctly identified authorized workers as "authorized." Only 0.7% were authorized workers that E-Verify said were not authorized. America's Voice wants you to think that 0.7% is 50%. Pretty brazen, right?

Here's how they got to 50%. E-Verify found that 6.2% of the workers it checked came back as unauthorized. Of that 6.2%, half were illegal immigrants that E-Verify failed to identify. In other words, the 50% error rate only includes illegal immigrants who got away with it, not workers that were authorized to work but came back as unauthorized, as America's Voice would have you believe.

At Tuesday night's Ventura County Community College District board meeting, the chancellor requested more time to study a proposal to use the free E-Verify system for district employees.

The proposal was made last week by Bob Huber, who is running for mayor in Simi Valley. Incidentally, that city recently voted to use the controversial program, which is operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine if employees are valid to work in the United States.

It's controversial because of what it does, not how accurate it is. False positives happen only 0.7 percent of the time, and it has been shown to catch 46 percent of illegal immigrants whose information is fed into the system.

The remaining 54 percent that get away do so because they are using stolen (and valid) birth dates and social security names.

Overall, the system is accurate 96 percent of the time, according to a research company commissioned by the government.

There's the research--now can we get this thing moving?

On the heels of Simi Valley's decision to approve a pilot E-Verify for city workers, VC  Community College District President Bob Huber proposed that county colleges follow suit.

Huber is also running for mayor, and has made a campaign issue out of E-Verify, which is a free government program that analyzes employee information to evaluate whether they are eligible to work in this country. It has a 96 percent accuracy rate, which pretty much makes its adoption a no-brainer.

However, a fellow board member wondered how much time it would take to scan each employee's documents, estimating five minutes per person at a minimum.

"I want to find out how much time our employees would be taking on it," the Star quoted the board member as saying. "We're not overloaded with classified employees now. Time is money."

If that's a concern, let me volunteer to do it. I'll find time to use the free online utility. Let's get this thing done and stop quibbling.

When Simi Valley's City Council, which includes Huber's opponent Steve Sojka, voted to adopt E-Verify in "an emotionally charged" meeting, it became the first city in Ventura County to do so.

Opponents contend that E-Verify isn't accurate. However, a study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security shows that E-Verify catches 46 percent of illegal aliens it comes across. Not a home run, but if every company adopted E-Verify and we were able to catch half of all the illegal aliens working in those companies we'd be doing pretty good, because right now that number is ZERO percent. I'd guess that the reason that E-Verify doesn't catch the other half is because the illegals are using real, stolen identification information.

Certainly we don't want to be saying people are illegal when they are really legal. E-Verify avoids false positives 99.3 percent of the time. That's just about as close to perfect as you can get.

So the program sounds like it works pretty darn well. So my offer is out there--if cost is an issue for the college district, I will volunteer my time, and I'm sure others would do the same, to work on this program for you.