Summarization
– Judicial Watch is a national leader fighting for cleaner and fairer elections. The left opposes voter ID. Having dirty names on the roles provides extra wiggle room for those who want to engage in fraud. Several states have removed 2 million names from their roles thanks to Judicial Watch’s litigation.
– Judicial Watch sued Illinois to stop state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law. Having dirty names in the rolls provides extra wiggle room for those who want to engage in fraud. You can ask for records if you have a question about how your state cleans its roles.
Transcript
Why would anyone oppose that? Because having dirty names on the roles, in my view, provides extra wiggle room for those who want to engage in fraud. One of the reasons the left wants to shut us down is because they don’t want us to talk about election integrity. And Judicial watch is a national leader in fighting for cleaner and fairer election.
Under law, the left opposes voter ID. They promote unsupervised voting, massive vote by mail schemes that make it almost impossible to ensure that votes aren’t maliciously messed with both either through intimidation or fraud. And then, of course, they support counting votes forever in a day, even after election day, in a way that undermines confidence in the elections.
And Judicial watch has also been the leader in ensuring, certainly if we’re going to be mailing ballots all over the place, and certainly if we’re not going to be asking people for voter ID, that the people who are on the rolls. In states with or without voter IDs are supposed to be there, meaning that people who have moved away or died or otherwise become ineligible to vote in a certain state, their names are ultimately removed. And that typically had not been happening under the justice department’s interpretation or application of the law.
There had been a law passed during the Clinton administration by the left to encourage voter registration. They wanted to use welfare offices and motor voter, for instance, offices to encourage people to register to vote. And the concern from the conservatives was that, look, people should be registering to vote.
No one objects to that. But when you start registering people, every time they have an interaction with the government, you’re going to get double registrations, and people are going to be registering to vote who are ineligible. And so the deal was that they would have a part of the law.
This motor voter bill would also require states to take reasonable steps to clean up the roles and give people access to information about how those roles are being cleaned up. Well, guess which part of the law the left justice department enforced? You got it. The law requiring everybody and their mother to be registered to vote or have the ability to register to vote.
But they refused to enforce the law that required the states take reasonable steps to clean up the roles until judicial watch came around, and because, thankfully, the law allowed private parties to enforce it. And judicial watch filed the first lawsuits against Indiana and Ohio, I guess it was nearly it’s now over a decade ago, back in 2012, we began the litigation with the private enforcement of the law requiring states to take reasonable steps to clean up the roles. And in those two states, they did what we asked them to do.
They changed the law, or they cleaned up the roles. And so we were very pleased with that outcome. In Kentucky, we had a subsequent lawsuit that resulted in consent decree where hundreds of thousands of names were cleaned up.
In California, where the rolls were filthy, they hadn’t cleaned up the rolls in 20 years. We sued the state and Los Angeles county specifically and settled that federal lawsuit. And Los Angeles County just cleaned up.
They confirmed to us as a result of that settlement, 1.2 million names from the rolls. Similarly, in North Carolina, after we sued, North Carolina rushed to clean up about a half a million names.
They cleaned up a bunch of names in Pennsylvania, after we filed a lawsuit, we settled because they cleaned up the names and were going to seemingly keep us abreast for further cleanups. Same happened in Colorado. So we were doing the work of the justice department to clean up the election rolls.
And as a result of judicial Watch’s really heavy lifting over the last decade, it all came to a head really in the last year, year and a half, where we had several states clean up 2 million names from their roles thanks to our litigation. 2 million names. Incredible.
And of course, there’s still more to be done. The latest batch of numbers related to voter registration list has been released by the federal government just in the last few weeks. We’re carefully analyzing those records to see what other states need to clean up their roles.
So more is coming. And as I said, part of the problem is that the states don’t want to share information about their voter registration lists and what they’re doing to clean up the rolls. And Judicial watch had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State of elections board of elections, and its director, which grants access in order to gain access essentially to their list of registered voters.
And it was such a game our clients were having to go through in order to gain access to this list. State officials had refused to allow the nonprofit Illinois Conservative Union and three lawfully registered Illinois voters to obtain a copy of their state’s voter registration list despite their lawful request for these records. Under federal law, the state board allowed access to the records but made any meaningful review impossible at requiring the plaintiffs to travel to Springfield, Illinois, which is the capital, during limited working hours, and review Illinois’millions of voter records one at a time on a computer terminal with no ability to sort or organize records.
So we sued and we got a settlement. And this is what the judge entered in the settlement. Pursuant to this agreement.
Defendants the Illinois government officials shall provide to plaintiffs the current, centralized, statewide list of registered voters for Illinois in electronic format and with all fields provided to political committees, including, but not limited to fields. Indicating the registrant’s full name, residential street address, email address, telephone number, county, state voter identification number, age of the registrant and the registrant. Status active or inactive, and the most recent date the entry was changed in voting history for the last 15 elections.
So before this lawsuit was filed, our clients couldn’t get access to any of that information. They had to go down to the office in Springfield, Illinois, look at record by record on an Illinois government computer, and now they gain access to the information, according to settlement that parties get the same access to citizens. Now can get access to it for the purposes, obviously, of making sure the lists are being properly maintained, as the federal law requires.
As I said, the National Voter Registration Act provides that states, quote, shall make available for public inspection and where available, photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purposes of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters. So how does acomport were telling them that they had they look at their records one record at a time during, quote, normal business hours at the state Board of Elections office in Springfield, which was 200 miles from where they live. We argued that those restrictions made a mockery of federal law as much as there was the equivalent of requiring our clients to wear blindfolds.
Now, what had happened was I think that helped accelerate this settlement is that Judge Ellis ruled on an emotion in the case that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that Illinois law conflicts with and frustrates the federal law’s purpose of providing voter information to the public to help ensure the accuracy and currency of voter registration rolls. She allowed a claim to proceed under the equal protection Clause of the 14th Amendment on the grounds that political committees in Illinois can access copies of the voter registration database while ordinary citizens can’t. The claims made as I said, the claims were made against the top election officials in Illinois.
Now, the numbers still are difficult or still bad in Illinois in the sense that it looks like those current numbers I’m telling you about. According to our forthcoming study on the matter, that 14% of Illinois counties have more registered voters than citizens over 18, while Illinois as a whole has close to 800,000 inactive registrants. Now, inactive means they haven’t voted, arguably in the last federal election, but at least in the last federal election.
So a portion of those names should be off the list if they’re cleaning the rolls the way they’re supposed to under the law. And gaining access to this full list will allow our clients and others like Judicial Watch to get a better picture of how Illinois is maintaining its voter lists. It doesn’t mean all this information is going to be misused.
It’s for the purposes of maintaining cleaner lists. The public records provisions of the National Voter Registration Act, as federal courts have found throughout the nation, were intended to enhance the ability of private groups to monitor whether states are removing ineligible voters from their roles. In April 2020, a federal court, Maryland, noted that organizations such as Judicial Watch have the resources and expertise that few individuals can marshal.
By excluding these organizations from access to voter registration lists, the purpose of the federal law is undermined, and the court ordered Maryland to produce the records there as well. Now, as I keep on saying, clean voter rolls can mean cleaner. Also, the adverse of that is dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections.
And of course, this settlement with Illinois and I do give the credit to Illinois officials for settling with our clients here, because they could have fought us and they didn’t, and they agreed to give us access. Thanks to this lawsuit and their good sense, voters will now have the transparency that federal law requires in order to ensure elections in Illinois are more honest and cleaner. So it’s a victory for all legal voters in Illinois, and dare I say it, across the land.
In May of 2022, we have another lawsuit that we had filed that’s also of interest to you that’s ongoing. We sued Illinois on behalf of Congressman Mike BOST and two other registered Illinois voters to stop state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law. They count ballots that arrive for up to 14 days after Election Day, including ballots without a postmark.
I mean, how does that comport with free and fair elections? And I’ve talked to you about our other achievements related to the rule of law on elections. So I don’t know. I know that Biden administration is trying to jail people who want clean and honest elections, but Judicial Watch ain’t going to slow down.
The Justice Department’s been AWOL when it comes to enforcing the rule of law and requiring cleaner elections by making sure the roles are being kept clean in the states and it doesn’t require the states to do something crazy. You got to do the reasonable steps, and what typically is a reasonable step based on the law and Judicial Watches experience in the courts. So this is what’s supposed to happen under at least the federal interpretation of the law that has kind of come up as a result of our litigation and state’s response to it.
So if you don’t vote in a federal election, let’s say you didn’t vote last year in the congressional election, you’re supposed to get a card from your election authority, your local board of elections, or the state board of elections saying, hey, you didn’t vote, where are you now? If you don’t reply to that card or otherwise vote in the next two federal elections. So if you don’t vote in the 2024 election and if you don’t vote in the 2026 election and you don’t tell the state that you want to remain a registered voter, so you’re not required to vote, but you got to at least tell the state you’re still there, your name should be removed. So that’s like five or six years, practically speaking, until a voter who may have moved is removed.
Now, why would anyone oppose that? Because having dirty names in the rolls, in my view, provides extra wiggle room for those who want to engage in fraud. And if your locality isn’t doing that, you should ask them why. And the law that I’m talking about here isn’t just for Judicial Watch.
It’s for you, dear citizen. So if you have a question for how your locality or your state cleans its roles, you can ask for records. Look up the law that I’m talking about, the National Voter Registration Act.
I think it’s section eight I, and you can make a request under law to inspect these records. They may want to charge you for photocopying or something, but you can ask the question. And you’re asking the question, you should do it respectfully and figure out what the law allows you to ask.
Could get some good results. I know from Judicial Watch’s experience us calling attention to dirty voting rolls. It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to sue, because some of these jurisdictions say, thank you.
We’re cleaning them up right now. Thank you for telling us. In Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, we sent a letter saying your voting rules are out of whack.
It doesn’t look like you’ve been cleaning them. And their response was, they immediately removed 69,000 names. So who knows? So figure out how to ask the question.
It’s pretty easy. You can go to our website, look it up. Go to National Voter Registration Act, information related to information, requests for voter maintenance records, and you can ask the questions directly.
But in the meantime, you can bet judicial Watch is going to do the heavy lifting for you generally in terms of analyzing this information that the states have provided the federal government as to whether or not they’re maintaining accurate and clean election rules, as the federal law requires. And if they’re not, judicial Watch will do its darndest within our capacity to follow up and clean the roles. And I know we will be successful.
Why? Because our history shows that when we move and act, roles get cleaned. 2 million roles, names removed from the roles in the last year or so. And I suspect, as I said, many more are coming.
So we’ll keep you abreast as we continue this fight over the next few months into next year. We know time’s a wasting and we’re moving quickly. Thanks for watching.
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