A Republic Under Assault
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“Opt-out” Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) For many years, states have used citizen interactions with local government agencies, especially departments of motor vehicles, as a place to register voters. But in 2016, Oregon instituted a new wrinkle in this process, automatic voter registration… which is now on the books in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.
If you live in an AVR state and register your car at the local DMV, you will automatically be registered to vote. You will have to “opt out” if you don’t want to or are ineligible to vote. AVR’s threat to election integrity is its inability to adequately filter noncitizens from registering to vote, since so many states issue driver’s licenses with minimal or no validation of citizenship. The Left is an expert at exploiting failings in governmental systems to their political benefit.
Abolition of Voter ID Requirements The Left does all it can to help noncitizens vote in our elections, which is why they have declared all-out war on states that attempt to require a photo voter ID to vote. Next to clean voter rolls, voter ID is the best way to block voter fraud, but the Left’s legal attacks on voter ID laws, frequently spearheaded by Soros-funded groups, are unremitting. Judicial Watch believes that only eligible U.S. citizens should vote, which is why we have defended voter ID laws in the courts.
Abolition of Voter Residency Requirements North Dakota requires voters to produce identification showing a name, birth date, and residential address. The Left is fighting the residential address requirement, falsely charging that it discriminates against the homeless and Native Americans. Judicial Watch is monitoring this situation very closely, because we believe North Dakota is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to attacks on residency requirements… because eliminating residency requirements will enhance opportunities for more illegal, multiple voting!
Abolition of the Electoral College Under the Electoral College, the president is elected by “the most votes in the most states.” This system allows for the possibility that a candidate may win the Electoral College vote, and the presidency, while losing the popular vote… as happened in 2016, 2000, 1888, and 1876. Not surprisingly, considering the 2016 and 2000 results, the Left is all in for abolishing the Electoral College.
Some liberals are going the lawful route (a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College was introduced in the U.S. Senate by four senators, including former presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand of New York). Far more insidiously, some groups are pushing states to pledge—by state law—to follow the national popular vote results when casting their Electoral College votes. Too many states (including blue states like California, Illinois, and New York), plus the District of Columbia, have signed on to this scheme to bypass the Constitution in order to increase their chances of winning the White House. Not surprisingly, it has been reported that a George Soros foundation gave $1 million to one of these groups, National Popular Vote Inc. Judicial Watch stands firmly for the Constitution, and opposes tampering with the Electoral College.
Same-Day Voter Registration Liberals say same-day voter registration makes it easier for people to vote and increases voter turnout. In fact, same-day voter registration is just one more effort to corrupt honest elections, as it opens the door to allowing ineligible individuals to vote (because inadequate time is allowed to determine eligibility), as well as permitting unscrupulous individuals to vote in more than one place on Election Day. As of today, seventeen states and the District of Columbia permit same-day registration… and the Left is pushing hard to increase those numbers. Judicial Watch is looking for appropriate ways to intervene in opposition to the expansion of what is nothing more than an open invitation to increased voter fraud.
Out-of-Precinct Voting This is a variation of same-day voter registration… and again, the Left’s argument is that it will make it easier for people to vote and will increase voter turnout. There is no proof to substantiate their claims, but for sure this scheme will make it impossible for local precinct officials to identify voters they know by sight! Out-of-precinct voting is a priority for Soros-funded groups… and Judicial Watch is exploring legal strategies to challenge it!
This agenda is a serious threat to honest elections not only this year but beyond, and as the Left aggressively pushes these under-the-radar fronts to make it easier for voter fraud—including noncitizen voting—to tilt the electoral playing field permanently in its favor.
As you will see by what follows, we are doing all in our power to protect the security of the franchise and elections.
DIRTY VOTER ROLLS CAN MEAN DIRTY ELECTIONS
Judicial Watch is the nation’s leaders in enforcing the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) requirements that states take reasonable steps to clean their voter registration rolls by removing ineligible registrations.
The law allows private, aggrieved parties to sue to enforce the cleanup provision. Judicial Watch brought the first such lawsuits in history against Indiana and Ohio. Indiana, in response to our lawsuit, got its act together and fixed a key state law tied to voter list maintenance. In Ohio, we were able to settle our case. And the Left went crazy. They challenged the simple resulting process of Ohio’s sending one mailing to voters who hadn’t voted in an election. If the voter then didn’t respond to the card and didn’t vote in the next two federal elections—only then could the voters be cleaned from the rolls.
This leftist challenge went all the way to the Supreme Court, and we won!
Specifically, the Supreme Court decision known as Husted upheld the Ohio law providing that the state had to send address confirmation notices to all registered voters who had not voted in the previous two years. This ruling has the effect of also upholding our 2014 settlement agreement with Ohio, which required Ohio to use that same procedure as part of a regular Supplemental Mailing designed to identify whether registered Ohio voters had moved away—one of many steps intended to fulfill Ohio’s obligations under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to maintain the integrity of its voter list.
Judicial Watch filed several amicus briefs supporting Ohio’s efforts at every level of the federal court system as the case progressed from the trial court all the way up to the Supreme Court. The case was on appeal from the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which held Ohio’s process was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) (Jon Husted, Ohio Secretary of State v. Philip Randolph Institute, et al. [No. 16-980]).
Judicial Watch’s amicus brief argued that the Sixth Circuit ruling would adversely affect its settlement agreement with Ohio were it allowed to stand. Judicial Watch also pointed out that failing to respond to an address confirmation notice does not mean that a registration is removed from the voter rolls. It merely triggers another waiting period, which can last up to four more years, during which the registrant still has the right to vote. In all, it can take up to six years before a registration is canceled under the process.
This Supreme Court win was a historic victory for cleaner elections. And it meant states with dirty voting rolls had less legal room to maneuver when Judicial Watch came knocking with evidence of problems.
In 2018, after the Husted Supreme Court decision, a federal court judge issued a historic consent decree directing the commonwealth of Kentucky to remove the names of ineligible voters no longer in residence from its official voter registration lists. U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove of the Eastern District of Kentucky, Central Division, signed the consent decree between Judicial Watch, Kentucky, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). (This was one of the rare DOJ sightings in election integrity cases!)
Kentucky consented to clean its voter rolls:
The Kentucky State Board of Elections shall develop and implement a general program of statewide voter list maintenance that makes a reasonable effort to remove from the statewide voter registration list the names of registrants who have become ineligible due to a change in residence in accord with section 8 of the NVRA.
Kentucky State Board of Elections shall create a Comprehensive Plan and implement and adhere to its terms.
The decree was comprehensive, and required:
Procedures for a general program of list maintenance
Sources of information used regularly
Procedures for sending a non-forwardable canvass mailing
Procedures for using the data that is successfully matched to the statewide voter registration list
Timing of notices and updates
List of registrants to whom notices have been sent
Procedures for removing from the statewide voter registration list any registrant who is mailed a notice
A description of databases to be used in list maintenance activities and a plan to consult with relevant database managers, assess the quality of data to be used in list maintenance activities, and develop sound and reliable matching criteria
Procedures for maintaining and making available for inspection and copying the records concerning implementation of the general program activities
A detailed description of any role that local election officials may play in list maintenance activities
Public outreach
Our battle began in November 2017, when Judicial Watch sued Kentucky over its failure to take reasonable steps to maintain accurate voter registration lists (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Alison Lundergan Grimes et al. [No. 3:17-cv-00094]). In June 2018, with Judicial Watch’s consent, the Justice Department moved to intervene in the lawsuit against Kentucky.
Our lawsuit argued that forty-eight Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of eighteen. The suit noted that Kentucky was one of only three states in which the statewide active registration rate is greater than 100 percent of the age-eligible citizen population.
The Kentucky win is the first statewide consent decree (and still the only one!) ever issued in a “clean voter rolls” lawsuit started by private litigants. This consent decree was a big victory for the voters of Kentucky and across America that want clean elections. But something even bigger was coming—in California!
CALIFORNIA CLEANS UP
Never would I have imagined that our most significant clean elections success would be in California—and arise as a result of a settlement with the notoriously leftist political leadership of that state.
Kentucky had dirty voting rolls but California, given its size, had a list maintenance problem of epic proportions.
In 2018, Judicial Watch and our clients/fellow co-plaintiffs sued California and Los Angeles County over the election rolls issue. California had the highest rate of inactive registrations of any state in the country. Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country. Judicial Watch argued that the state of California and a number of its counties, including the county of Los Angeles, have registration rates exceeding 100 percent:
Eleven of California’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100% of the age-eligible citizenry.
Los Angeles County has more voter registrations on its voter rolls than it has citizens who are old enough to register. Specifically, according to data provided to and published by the EAC, Los Angeles County has a registration rate of 112% of its adult citizen population.
The entire State of California has a registration rate of about 101% of its age-eligible citizenry.
Judicial Watch pointed out that this is due in part to the high numbers of inactive registrations that are still carried on California’s voter rolls:
About 21% of all of California’s voter registrations, or more than one in five, are designated as inactive.
California has the highest rate of inactive registrations of any state in the country.… Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.
Although these inactive registrations should be removed after a statutory waiting period consisting of two general federal elections, California officials are simply refusing to do so.
Even though a registration was officially designated as “inactive,” it may still be voted on Election Day and is still on the official voter registration list. The inactive registrations of voters who have moved to a different state “are particularly vulnerable to fraudulent abuse by a third party” because the voter who has moved “is unlikely to monitor the use of or communications concerning an old registration.” Inactive registrations “are also inherently vulnerable to abuse by voters who plan to fraudulently double-vote in two different jurisdictions on the same election day.”
In essence, we were talking about millions of potentially dirty names in a state that hasn’t had a proper voter list maintenance procedure for twenty years. This was setting up to be a giant legal battle. But our election law legal team, led by Robert Popper, a former DOJ Civil Rights Division senior official, plowed ahead and took testimony and gathered documentary evidence.
Armed with helpful evidence we had gathered, and with the Husted Supreme Court decision at our back, we had a strong case to make. But even getting to trial and then winning would be still be tough slough against a massive state legal apparatus and leftist cohorts whose groups had sought to intervene against us and our coplaintiffs in the federal court case.
But then we settled!
As a result, the state of California and the county of Los Angeles have begun the process of removing from their voter registration rolls as many as 1.6 million inactive registered names. Huge!
Los Angeles County has over 10 million residents, more than the populations of forty-one of the fifty United States. California is America’s largest state, with almost 40 million residents.
The new settlement required all of the 1.6 million potentially ineligible registrants on Lost Angeles County’s rolls to be notified and asked to respond. If there is no response and they don’t vote in the next two federal elections, those names are to be removed as required by the NVRA. The county sent the mailing as promised, which could and should result in the immediate removal of ineligible names.
California secretary of state Alex Padilla also agreed, which he did, to update the State’s online NVRA manual to make clear that ineligible names must be removed and to notify each California county that they are obligated to do this. This should lead to cleaner voter rolls statewide.
This settlement vindicated Judicial Watch’s groundbreaking lawsuits to clean up state voter rolls to help ensure cleaner elections. We were obviously thrilled with this historic settlement that will clean up election rolls in Los Angeles County and California—as it also set a nationwide precedent to ensure that states take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.
The massive settlement received national notice and caught the attention of President Trump, who repeatedly referenced the numbers as indications of voter fraud.
As president of a national organization, I sign a lot of documents. I would daresay that one of my most important signatures to date was on behalf of Judicial Watch and our millions of supporters on that settlement agreement with California and Los Angeles County.
Despite our successful litigation to bring counties and states into compliance with the NVRA, voter registration lists across the country remain significantly out of date. According to our analysis of data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in 2019, 378 counties nationwide have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to vote, that is, counties where registration rates exceed 100 percent.
These 378 counties combined had about 2.5 million registrations over the 100 percent–registered mark, which is a drop of about one million from our previous analysis of voter registration data. Although San Diego County removed 500,000 inactive names from voter rolls following our settlement with Los Angeles County, San Diego still had a registration rate of 117 percent and has one of the highest registration rates in the county.
In the latest rou
nd of warning letters, we explain that implausibly high registration rates raise legal concerns.
An unusually high registration rate suggests that a jurisdiction is not removing voters who have died or who have moved elsewhere, as required by [federal law].
Judicial Watch also considers how many registrations were ultimately removed from the voter rolls because a registrant [had moved]. If few or no voters were removed… the jurisdiction is obviously failing to comply.… States must report the number of such removals to the EAC.
We found major voting list issues in California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado. The following counties have excessive registration rates or have failed to cancel sufficient numbers of ineligible registrations:
Colorado Jefferson County
California Imperial County
Monterey County
Orange County
Riverside County
San Diego County
San Francisco County
San Mateo County
Santa Clara County
Solano County
Stanislaus County
Yolo County
North Carolina
Guilford County
Mecklenburg County
Virginia Fairfax County
Pennsylvania Allegheny County
Bucks County
Chester County
Delaware County
We don’t make idle threats and have followed up with two new federal lawsuits against North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
In North Carolina, we sued the state and Mecklenburg County and Guilford County to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls as required by the federal law. On top of that, they couldn’t be bothered to provide us with basic records we requested under the law.