Huge New Lawsuit To Clean Up Voter Rolls | Judicial Watch

They want either no elections or dirty elections, or they want the ability to steal elections if they don’t like the outcome. Now, you know, if the left media had its way, and I call it the left Borg, that’s a Star Trek reference. For those of you who don’t know, you can look it up. You’ll see what I mean. This group think that tells us we’re not allowed to be concerned about election integrity.

How dare you demand that there be voter ID? How dare you believe that mass mail in ballots isn’t exactly the best way to ensure that votes are cast accurately and fairly and free of fraud? That ballot harvesting, they say. How dare you try to stop strangers from going around collecting votes from people and showing up with them and dumping them? How dare you object to that? But of course, we’re not scared, and we stand strong against this.

And one of the ways we stand strong on behalf of free and fair elections is to challenge in federal court those states and localities that fail to follow federal law to take reasonable steps to clean up the rolls. And to that end, we just filed another lawsuit against Illinois to require that state to follow the law to clean up the rolls because the roles there are a mess.

Now, we’ve done this before. We’ve done it in California and New York. Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio. We settled with most of those jurisdictions. Kentucky, I think, was a consent decree. It wasn’t a settlement. And all of that has resulted previously. 4 million names being removed from the roles, 440,000 in New York City. I forget the number in Pennsylvania. 1. 2 million was confirmed in La county alone. So 4 million in the last year or so by judicial watch.

So we looked at the numbers in Illinois. Our election team, led by Bob Popper, who’s a former Justice Department attorney, civil rights expert, voting law expert, and his voting law colleagues and experts here at Judicial watch, looked at the available data. And it isn’t just, well, judicial watch is just making up these numbers. How do we know? We look at the numbers that Illinois counties present to the federal government, and we see, and then, of course, we ask additional questions, as the law allows us to do, and we find out what they’re doing or as importantly, what they’re not doing.

And according to our lawsuit, they’re not doing much of anything in at least 60% of the counties in Illinois to remove the names. And let me give you some of the detail here. 23 Illinois counties with a combined registration list of 980,000 or so voters reported removing a combined total of 100 registrations in the last two year reporting period under this crucial provision of the federal law that we’re trying to enforce here, the National Voter Registration act.

The lawsuit alleges that this is an absurdly small number and contends that there is no possible way these counties can be conducting a general program that makes a reasonable effort to cancel registrations of voters who’ve become ineligible because of a change of residence while removing so few registrations. Generally, what the law requires, and we’ve kind of, kind of set the standard as to what the law requires through our previous historic litigation that I talked to you about, is, let’s say you don’t vote in 2022, you didn’t vote in the congressional election.

Your jurisdiction, either the state or the county, typically, well, I shouldn’t say typically. Your jurisdiction, the responsible jurisdiction. How’s that? Is supposed to send you a card that will say, it’s me. Hey, Tom Fitton, you didn’t vote. We don’t have a record of you voting. Are you still there? And if you are still there, please let us know. And what happens is, unless the voter responds affirmatively or votes in the two next federal elections, so you don’t necessarily have to respond, but if you just show up and vote over the next two federal election cycles, so 2024 and 2026, if you still don’t show up and you don’t give an answer that you still want to be registered, they’re supposed to remove you from the rolls.

So what happens is states either don’t send the cards out, they don’t make any inquiry, and the list just gets dirtier and dirtier because in America, which is still a free country, people move around a lot, right? And so people move and die. Or if they do send the cards out and they don’t follow up, either the person doesn’t respond to the card and doesn’t vote, and they still don’t remove.

So this is like five years almost that a voter hasn’t been active and they’re leaving the names on the rolls. Now, the problem is that dirty names can mean dirty elections. That’s why there’s this federal requirement that you take reasonable steps to clean up the rolls, because that’s a potential pool of dirty voters that can be used to vote illegally, among other reasons, including just a basic reason of Americans don’t like it if the rolls have names on there that aren’t supposed to be, and it undermines confidence in the elections.

Another reason why the feds passed the law, and of course, it was passed in tandem with the motor voter bill. Remember that? So the motor voter bill required states and public agencies to make it easier to register to vote. And the concern was, well, too many people will double register because they’ll be asked repeatedly to register to vote and the list won’t be clean as a result. And the deal was, well, we’ll just require the states to take regional sets to clean up the rolls.

So guess which way the left went? They just enforced the massive registration requirement and ignored the cleanup report. So this is a big lawsuit. Illinois is a big state, and there are a lot of major issues. I mean, Cook county, which is where know is, I don’t think they’re even reporting, you know, as we lay out, if they’re not reporting data, it probably means they don’t have good data to report.

So they’re probably on that list of counties that isn’t doing what they’re supposed to do and removing the names. And those numbers could be potentially huge. So I’m thinking that there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of extra names on the roles in Illinois that need to be removed. And I talked about this in announcing the lawsuit, and I made another video on it which nicely summarizes it for you, and I encourage you to share it as well.

So let’s run that now. Hey, everyone, judicial watch. President Tom fit here. Election integrity update. Judicial watch is in federal court against the state of Illinois because that state and its counties haven’t been cleaning up its election rolls. The counties simply haven’t been removing names as they’re supposed to. That means tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of extra voting names are on the rolls. Dirty election rolls can mean dirty elections.

Now, we’re not coming to this effort lightly. We’ve already been in court and we have results to show for that work. Upwards of 4 million names removed from the rolls in places like New York City, in California, in Pennsylvania. More needs to be done. That’s why we’re in Illinois now. So as I note, this isn’t our first rodeo, and we’ve done this type of litigation before. We know what to look for.

And it’s getting increasingly frustrating, at least to me as president of, you know, despite very liberal jurisdictions settling with us when we raise these issues, Los Angeles county and California, they settled with us. Now, did it solve the problem completely in California? I’ll talk about that in a minute. New York City settled with us. Pennsylvania settled with us. New York removed 440,000 names, I think after we blew the whistle as to what they were doing, DC we didn’t sue, so they didn’t settle.

They’re going to, if they haven’t already removed 138,000 names because of judicial watch pressure. And our lawyers know what they’re doing. And we’re some of the top election lawyers in the country. And what they found in Illinois, beyond what I told you earlier, I mean, there’s even more their own reported data. So this is Illinois material. This is not judicial watches data. This is Illinois data showed that more than one fifth of the counties remove few or no registrations.

As I say, under this national Voter Registration act, this motor voter bill, Illinois informed the Federal Election Assistance Commission that 34 counties simply failed to report any data about removals. Well, no data suggests no removals, in my view. And that’s what we alleged. 19 of these counties also failed to report any data regarding registrations removed because of the death of a voter. I mean, that’s a really easy, that’s what they call, I shouldn’t say they call, to use the famous phrase or the well worn phrase low hanging fruit, if a county or state isn’t removing dead voters.

I mean, what on earth is going on? That’s what’s happening in Illinois. In too many counties, dozens of other counties failed to report some other key data to the EAC. That provides us reassurance if it was fully reported that the law was being followed. So it’s pretty clear the laws are being followed. And as I say in the release, illinois’voting roles are a mess. Dirty voting roles can mean dirty elections.

Illinois should take immediate steps to clean its roles to both prevent fraud and increase voter confidence in the. I say, as I said earlier, Judicial watch is a national leader in the effort to clean up the voting roles and also to ensure election integrity is upheld in other ways. We filed many, many election law briefs, or amicus briefs to preserve and protect voter ID and advocate for that.

We’ve successfully challenged politicized gerrymandering that seek to rig elections by moving voters around, usually based on race or other improper political considerations. And as I said before, we’ve got this demonstrated record where our heavy lifting has gotten astonishing results to remove upwards of 4 million names from the rolls. And that’s just in the last year or two. And we warned Illinois they didn’t take heed of our warning.

So we’re now in federal court. And it’s not just on our behalf, it’s on behalf of a voter and two public interest groups in Illinois. One of the great things about working at Judicial Watch is being able to work with great clients who are citizens or whistleblowers. Journalists. Yeah, there are good journalists out there or activist groups involved in a conservative cause. Sometimes we work with candidates, not because we’re promoting their candidacy, but because they’ve got claims.

And two of the great organizations we’re working with in Illinois on this important case are the Illinois Family Action Group, which is a nonprofit and tax exempt legislative action arm of the Illinois Family Institute. It was founded in 2010 to promote the common good and general welfare, primarily by means of education, including direct and grassroots lobbying. It works to advance public policies to protect the sanctity of human rights, life, christian marriage and natural family, and other initiatives which are consistent with principles of good government.

So it’s a good, culturally conservative, christian oriented organization that wants to exercise its First Amendment rights and is being harmed by having these dirty voting rules. It makes it harder for them to do their job. Also breakthrough ideas is a policy advocacy and education network that advances the causes of peace, prosperity, and freedom by highlighting the virtue of taxpayer centric and liberty focused policies and how they benefit all community members.

So a group like that, let’s say they want to knock on doors, right? You kind of figure out, well, we want to talk to voters, and if the voter lists are dirty, you’re wasting your time and wasting money by knocking on doors of people who are no longer there because they’ve moved. So this is a great lawsuit against Illinois. California also has a dirty roles problem. Even though LA cleaned up and has got a process in place to clean up.

And they’ve confirmed to us that they’ve cleaned up 1. 6 million names, other jurisdictions in California aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. So litigation, there’s a significant potential, how’s that for a political way of putting it? There’s a significant potential for litigation against California over its failure to clean up the rolls. So stay tuned for that. So when it comes to clean elections, Judicial watch won’t ever stop because the battle is ongoing.

As I said earlier, the left wants to end elections as we know it by eliminating Trump from the ballot. That’s a clean elections issue, too, right? And of course, opposing voter ID and any sensible measure to increase voter confidence and ensure your right to vote is secure is something they oppose, too. And the conclusion I draw from that is they want either no elections or dirty elections, or they want the ability to steal elections if they don’t like the outcome through fraud and other misconduct.

And so judicial watch will continue to do the heavy lifting for the rule of law on elections. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and like our video down below. .

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