TORONTO — Mike Quinn, a Canadian retiree from Niagara Falls, Ontario, with a home in Florida, says he does not have a criminal record and considers himself a "boring guy."
That’s why he cannot figure out why United States authorities were giving him a hard time at the border and why he had been banned from entering the country, according to The Canadian Press.
Quinn will have to sell his Florida home in the next six months if the bureaucratic issues aren't cleared up.
"If I can't get this resolved in the next six months, I'm getting out of the states. Sell everything," Quinn told The Canadian Press. "I'm not asking for forgiveness. I didn't do anything."
The case revolves around 15-year-old voter registration card he signed. In one of his last trips across the border, U.S. authorities detained Quinn in 2014, according to the publication.
They took his Nexus card, claiming Quinn had falsified his marital status on his application for the trusted travel program.
They claimed he had falsified his Nexus application by giving his marital status as single. Quinn denied the accusation and told them he had never been married.
He has spent the rest of the time since then trying to get his card back and has not received an explanation from either U.S. or Canadian authorities.
So how did this document come into play?
According to The Canadian Press, Quinn said he went to a county office in Florida in 2000 to renew a driver’s license. At the office, he was told he had to sign a voter registration form that showed him as a citizen of the U.S. He wonders if that was the error when he was issued a Social Security number.
Quinn said he told the clerk about what happened, and she told him he could not renew the license unless he signed a voter form. Quinn said she told him that he would tell her supervisor of the error, so Quinn signed the form and then never did anything about it, according to The Canadian Press.
"I should never have been given the voter application form to sign, period, let alone been forced to sign it if I wanted to renew my Florida driver's license," he said.