4 Million Names Cleaned off Dirty Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

➡ Judicial Watch, an organization focused on maintaining clean voter rolls, has prompted the removal of over 100,000 ineligible names from the D.C. Board of Elections’ voter rolls. This action is part of a larger effort by Judicial Watch to ensure accurate voter lists across the U.S., with 4 million names removed nationwide in recent years. The organization uses data provided by states to the federal government to identify potential inaccuracies, such as voters who have moved, died, or otherwise become ineligible to vote. The goal is to reduce opportunities for election fraud and increase confidence in the electoral process.
➡ Judicial Watch, a legal watchdog group, has been working to clean up voter registration rolls across various states, removing names that should no longer be there due to reasons like death or relocation. They’ve sent violation notices to places like Washington D.C., Illinois, and California, where they believe the voter rolls are not being properly maintained. This is part of their ongoing effort to prevent potential voter fraud and maintain election integrity. So far, their litigation has resulted in the removal of 4 million names from voter rolls in recent years.

100,000 names were removed because Judicial Watch asked the D.C. Board of Elections, what’s going on here? You haven’t cleaned up your rolls. And they responded by removing immediately 103,000 names. We just got victory after victory last week. The biggest one, or I guess, it’s like they’re, you know, Judicial Watch victories are like my children. Which do I love more, right? I love them all equally. D.C. removing 130,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls in response to Judicial Watch. And what Judicial Watch has done is second to none in cleaning up America’s voting rolls.

And this is on top of 4 million names from voter rolls across the nation that have been cleaned up just in the last year or two by Judicial Watch. So let me give you the background here. Judicial Watch, after the 2022 elections, started analyzing data in the states. And mostly states, much of the data is data that the states are supposed to provide to the federal government. And the agency’s called the Election Assistance Commission. And the data is supposed to include the numbers of names they’ve removed pursuant to the National Voter Registration Act, which requires reasonable steps to clean up the rolls, which means they’ve got to clean up the rolls every now and again.

Because as you might imagine, being an American yourself, the people move around a lot in this country or they die or otherwise become ineligible to vote. And so you’ve got to track that and clean up the rolls. Because when you have a bunch of dirty names on the rolls, it increases the opportunities for fraud in elections. And certainly undermines confidence in elections. People think everybody and their mothers on a list, including people who haven’t been alive for 15 years or you’re in Kansas and they moved to Florida 13 years ago and they’re still on the voting list.

That ain’t good. And that’s why the federal law requires states to take reasonable steps to clean up the rolls. And that includes, thanks to Judicial Watch solidifying this process through our litigation previously, if you don’t show up to vote in a federal election, this is what’s supposed to happen. The state will recover jurisdiction under the NVRA, should send you a card or some type of communication. Let’s say it’s me. Hey, Tom Fitton, I live here in the District of Columbia. You didn’t vote last election. Are you okay? Not like that, but are you still there? And if you don’t respond to that communication or vote within the next two federal elections, so that’s upwards of four, maybe even five years depending on how the calendar runs, right? They’re supposed to take your name off the rolls.

Now in the District of Columbia, I don’t know for sure this happened, but it looks like they sent the notice card saying, hey, are you there? But they never bothered to follow up and take people’s names off the rolls who weren’t there. And so Judicial Watch noticed that they weren’t cleaning up their rolls based on the CAC data, and so we sent them a letter saying, what’s happening here? This is a nice letter early on. And I don’t know, did I get the letter out? I think we were supposed to print it out, but I don’t have it here.

So anyway, the letter was dated in the beginning of last month, November, and they admitted to us that it removed. Oh, there’s the letter there. Let me put on my glasses so I can read it. I’m going to come up close and read it to you. I’m writing in response to the notice of violation sent by Judicial Watch on September 22nd, 2023. So we requested that they correct these issues in their list maintenance program. That’s the legal or our way for talking about it. So we note the failure to remove voters from the registry from November 2020 to November 2022 pursuant to the law, and the number of inactive registrations as a result of its total registration rate.

So if people haven’t voted in a long time, the states call them inactive. They’re still eligible to vote, but they call them inactive to pretend that they should be there and they’re being treated appropriately when, in fact, that’s not true, especially if they’re there for years and years. The board has taken several list maintenance actions since we provided our last response to Judicial Watch. First, the board removed 65,544 inactive voters on October 30th, 2023. This letter is dated November 1st, so I think it was the day before or two. How many date? It’s October 31 days in October.

65,000 names. That’s incredible. And this is the process, as I described to you. The voters did not vote in a 2016 general election, did not respond to the address confirmation notices that the board sent, and did not participate in any district elections held between the dates of the notices that were sent and the November 2020 general election. So they became eligible for removal, but they didn’t do it until Judicial Watch bugged them earlier this year. The board will soon remove an additional 37,962,000 inactive voters. So you know what that means. It’s well over 100,000 voters they’re removing.

That’s 15% of the list. And it goes on. The board, the voters did not vote. Again, they highlight. Second, the board moved 73,000 voters from an active to an inactive status on October 3rd, 2023 as a result of the 2023 biennial process or Canvas process. And so those names won’t be removed for a few years yet. So 100,000 names were removed because Judicial Watch asked the D.C. Board of Elections, what’s going on here? You haven’t cleaned up your rolls. And they responded by removing immediately 103,000 names. That is 15% of the voter list in Washington, D.C.

I think there are about 700,000 voters. Due to math, it’s about 15%. Incredible. Incredible. Now is that good enough for us? Well, if we could trust that the program was put in place and they were going to regularly follow it other than through this ad hoc fashion, yes. But as I’m describing the process to you, you can see they only do something when we ask them to do it. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. So we sent them another or followed up with a notice of violation letter. And I guess that one from September is still valid.

So that one, you know, we may end up suing as soon as this month. But it’s not just in D.C. that this issue has arisen because we’ve done an analysis nationwide. California and Illinois have dirty voting rolls, too, based on their own data that they provided to the federal government. So we sent notice of violation letters, too, to Illinois and California. The notice letter to California, which was sent on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California states, California’s survey responses to the Election Assistance Commission shows that 27 counties reported removing five or fewer and in most of these counties zero voter registrations in the last two-year period for failing to respond to an address confirmation notice and failing to vote in two consecutive general federal elections.

Another 19 counties simply did not report any data about such removals. And then 21 counties had more voter registrations than citizens over the age of 18 based on census estimates. So what does that last part mean? It means they have more people on the voter rolls than are living there and eligible to vote based on census data. Now, California, we’ve had litigation before and we settled. And part of the settlement resulted in, what was it, one point, what one point two million names being removed just since last year. I think the total was one point six is going to be removed.

And California generally sent a notice out to all of its counties as a result of this settlement that you’ve got to clean up the rolls, as Judicial Watch has suggested. Of course, I don’t think they gave us credit like that, but that’s more or less what was said. Obviously, that hasn’t been the case. Same goes in Illinois. Illinois has a similar problem. Twenty-three Illinois counties reported removing fewer than 15. And in almost half of those counties, zero voter registrations in two years between 2020 and 2022. Thirty-four Illinois jurisdictions simply did not report any data about such removals, so they’re not even telling them what they’re doing, which in my view means they’re not doing anything.

And 15 jurisdictions have again, as I said, more voter registrations than citizens of voting age. And these are some of the counties in California and Illinois that we’re talking about. Let me see here. My colleague sent me a note about it. I get a lot of emails. I’m sure you all get lots of emails, but I really get a lot of emails. Let me search for it here. But in California, here are some of the problematic counties. Orange County, they’ve got 2.1 million names in their rolls. They haven’t cleaned any of them.

Data not available. Riverside County, 1.586 million names on their rolls. No information about what names they’ve cleaned. San Bernardino, 1.3 million. Santa Clara, 1.2. Alameda, 1.1. Ventura, 609,000. San Francisco, 606,000. San Mateo, 555,000. It goes on and on. So when you think and apply the numbers from DC to certainly the numbers in LA County in terms of they’re removed about 15% of their rolls as well, I mean that’s a total of, among the counties that we looked at, 14 million names, right? So we’re talking potentially well over a million names that should be removed under this process.

I’m guessing here. I’m just guessing because I don’t know exactly. I mean some of these counties may come to us and say, oh no, we removed all the names. Don’t worry, don’t worry. But we know these counties have been around long enough that we know this. We’ve been following this long enough and the behavior of these counties generally to know this is what’s been going on for too long in California. And the same in Illinois, you know, the two big counties are Cook County and Chicago City, which have, Cook County has a 1.9 million names on their rolls.

Chicago City has 1.5. So that’s the major Chicago metropolitan area. And those jurisdictions haven’t reported removing anyone, anyone, for two years from their rolls. What’s going on there? So we sent these Notice of Violation letters. And as I said, we sent one to DC earlier. And this is, you know, this is what we told DC. We’re representing, we sent it on behalf of the Judicial Watch and the DC Republican Party. There is a Republican Party in Washington, DC. You may not know that. They don’t have a lot, I don’t think they have anyone in public office, certainly in the DC Council.

I don’t think so. DC reported removing zero voter registrations in the last two-year reporting period for failing to respond to an address confirmation notice and failing to vote for two consecutive general federal elections. And they flatly admitted to us that it was failing to remove registrations as required by the law. You know, just doing it in an emergency fashion after Judicial Watch tells you what you ask you about it. That’s not what the law is supposed to be. So I don’t know if this number includes the number of the voter registrations they removed, but maybe it’s beforehand.

But we noted in the letter that it was 131%. They had the total registration rate, its total number of registrations divided by the most recent census estimates of its citizen voting age population is greater than 131%. So let’s put it this way. Voter registration rates in states range from, of the voting age population, you know, it used to be 75%, but now it can get a lot higher than that because it’s easier to register the vote in a lot of these places. So it can be upwards of 85%, 90% in some jurisdictions.

And I’m sure there’s always outliers. It’s even closer to 100%. But obviously, anything over 100% is not right. And if it’s 131% of your eligible population, there’s something really not right. So this is the beginning of what might be additional litigation. If so, if we send the notice of violation, if they don’t respond as appropriate, and we’re not satisfied with the response, we have the right to sue. And this would follow several lawsuits we filed previously over the years to clean up the voter rolls in California, in Illinois, excuse me, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Indiana, in Kentucky.

We had a consent decree in Kentucky. They are cleaning thousands, tens of thousands of names. They had been. North Carolina, we settled as well. We just settled in Pennsylvania. And as I said at the top of this discussion, four million names have been cleaned as a result of judicial watch litigation just in the last few years. And let me put it this way. If we don’t do it, no one will. No one. I don’t think the Republican Party is cleaning up the rolls through litigation. Maybe they’ve started doing it since we’ve been doing it.

And that’d be one other two groups that have started moving. I’ve moved around this area as well, certainly on the area of the specific controversy of the not bothering to remove people who die, which is a whole other matter beyond moving away. I mean, if you can’t figure out a member of your jurisdiction died, what’s going on? Dead people on the rolls is an abomination to election security that really gets people upset. It really does. And of course, this is a law that can be enforced also by the Justice Department, but they refuse to do it because they oppose efforts to clean up the rolls because the Justice Department is controlled by partisan leftists who want to make it easier to steal elections.

They do. That’s how I explain it. They admit it that way. Of course, they’re not going to admit it, but that’s my analysis of their behavior. Why else would you oppose voter ID? Why else would you support ballot harvesting? Why else would you oppose efforts to clean up the rolls or not even enforce the law in that regard? And all the other efforts to undermine election and security measures. They want to make it easier to steal elections, to steal elections. And that’s why people’s confidence in our elections are – the confidence tends to – has been plummeting in recent years.

And we’ll continue to plummet unless our elected officials get serious about election integrity. So I’ll let you know when we file the federal lawsuits. I’ll let you know if other states start removing the names as they should, like in Illinois and California. There are other states that are on our radar that have also issues with the rolls not being clean. And as I said in our press release, let me read my quote, dirty voting rolls increase the potential for voter fraud. As Washington, D.C.’s quick cleanup of tens of thousands of names in response to Judicial Watch shows there are potentially hundreds of thousands of names on the voter rolls that should be removed by California and Illinois.

Indeed, Judicial Watch litigation resulted in a removal of 4 million names from voter rolls in various states recently. So our election law team is led by Bob Popper, who is a former Justice Department senior attorney. And he’s been at Judicial Watch for, I don’t know, I lose track of how long people have been here now, but at least 10 years. I think it’s 10 years plus. And he does some great work. I had an interview with him recently. We should repost that interview, or at least post a link to the interview with Bob, who can describe these issues to you more fully, or he described them more fully to us through the interview a few months ago.

So we should repost that or link it. So great work by Bob Popper, our election integrity team. We’re pleased to be working with our various partners in this area as well. The D.C. Republican Party here, the Libertarian Party, who do we work with in Illinois? Do you want to say something? Oh, we work with a voter in the Illinois Family Action Group, which is an activist group in Illinois, a great group, great conservative bunch of activists out there doing the Lord’s work quite literally, not only through their own work, but with Judicial Watch.

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