by Tom Fitton
In June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission released data showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of North Carolina’s one hundred counties are close to, at, or above 100 percent of their age-eligible citizenry—statistics considered by the courts to be a strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps required by law to remove ineligible registrants. Judicial Watch’s analysis also showed that at the time of the EAC report the entire state of North Carolina had a registration rate close to 100 percent of its age-eligible citizenry.
As of March 2020, North Carolina’s own data shows it has nearly one million inactive registrations!
Pennsylvania wasn’t much better.
We sued Pennsylvania and three of its counties for failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters. According to Judicial Watch’s analysis of voter registration data, these counties removed almost no names under NVRA procedures for identifying and updating the registrations of those who have moved. In some good news, one Pennsylvania county almost immediately removed 69,000 inactive names earlier this year in response to a Judicial Watch letter.
In its complaint, Judicial Watch points out that the state’s abnormally low number of removals under NVRA procedures designed to identify voters who have changed residence indicates that it is not removing inactive registrations as the law requires. According to data the state certified for the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), in the most recent two-year reporting period:
Bucks County, with about 457,000 registrations, removed a total of eight names under the relevant NVRA procedures;
Chester County, with about 357,000 registrations, removed five names under those procedures; and
Delaware County, with about 403,000 registrations, removed four names under those procedures.
As of April 2020, Pennsylvania’s own data shows it has more than 800,000 inactive registrations!
Thankfully, at least one Pennsylvania county acted to avoid being sued by Judicial Watch. On January 14, 2020, CBS Pittsburgh reported that because of the threat of a lawsuit from Judicial Watch, Allegheny County removed 69,000 inactive voters. David Voye, elections manager for the county, told CBS, “I would concede that we are behind on culling our rolls,” and that this had “been put on the backburner.”
Nearly 2 million “extra” names in just two states. You can see, especially as the Left pushes for unsecure vote by mail mass mailing, why it is urgent that we get the work done to clean up the rolls.
CAN CONGRESS HANDLE THE TRUTH?
Our battles aren’t limited to the courtroom. We were invited to testify in a major House hearing on elections and the coronavirus threat. The Left is pushing for national registration that would mandate vote by mail, undo voter ID, and push ballot harvesting across the nation (all under the pretext of the coronavirus emergency). Well, I was honored to testify (even if the hearing was stacked against us!). As you’ll see below from much of my prepared testimony, we confronted the Left head-on:
For years, Americans have been losing faith in the integrity of our electoral system. Many polls have been taken on this subject and they reach the same conclusion. The Gallup organization conducts a particularly interesting poll, which compares American attitudes with those of other countries. The poll simply asks respondents if they “have confidence” in the “honesty of elections.” Last year, only 40% of Americans answered yes, while an astonishing 59% said no. According to Gallup, the United States has “one of the worst ratings across the world’s wealthiest democracies,” with only Chile and Mexico reporting statistically lower ratings. This phenomenon long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Gallup reports that “[m]ajorities of Americans have consistently lacked confidence in the honesty of elections every year since 2012.”
Among the explanations for this loss of faith, we must include the public’s impatience with the politicization of electoral procedure, and, in particular, with dubious objections to what are widely perceived to be commonsense election integrity measures. The most obvious example to date concerns the heated, partisan fight against voter ID laws. A Pew Research Center study after the 2018 elections found strong, bipartisan support for voter ID, which was favored overall by 76 percent of those polled and even by a considerable majority of those identifying as Democrats (63 percent). This support is understandable in a society where one must produce identification for so many different reasons, from getting on a plane to buying prescription drugs to working out in a gym.
That voter ID laws are so often opposed, and with significant success, by political operators is a sad sign of our times. This opposition often relies on unsupported claims that voter ID will depress minority turnout, but this effect is never seen in actual elections. Opponents also try to flip the burden of proof, arguing in effect that, unless those favoring voter ID can prove that voter fraud is a common occurrence that costs elections, there is no justification for requiring an ID. This argument is bogus. As the Supreme Court has noted, regardless of the prevalence of fraud, states have an obvious, legitimate “interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters” and in “carefully identifying all voters participating in the election process.” This interest is justified by the nature of voter fraud, which is hard to detect or punish after the fact. On a more practical note, those expressing doubt about the existence of voter fraud reveal an unrealistic, if touching, view of human nature. People cheat at more or less everything. They cheat at baseball. They cheat at sumo wrestling. They cheat when it doesn’t matter, for example at online gaming or internet chess. Indeed, they cheat at solitaire. I cannot understand why voting, which is so tied up with intense partisan feeling and enthusiasm, would be exempt from cheating.
I could easily multiply examples of commonsense election integrity laws that partisans have made the subject of unnecessary and manufactured opposition. By far the silliest example I have found was a 2017 Virginia state bill that would have required electronic poll books to contain the photograph taken by the Department of Motor Vehicles for each registered voter who has a driver’s license. Note that the actual photograph of a voter taken by the DMV cannot possibly discriminate against that voter. Yet Governor McAuliffe vetoed that bill.
My point here is that the American people see what they conclude are disingenuous fights over electoral procedures and lose faith in the honesty of our elections. With this background in mind I turn to measures proposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the more common suggestions now is to require greater reliance on mail-in ballots. For example, last month Governor Newsom issued an executive order requiring that county elections officials transmit mail ballots to every registered voter in the state. I view this as a real threat to the integrity of American elections.
In 2005, the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission noted the particular risks associated with absentee (mail-in) ballots:
Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.… Absentee balloting is vulnerable to abuse in several ways: Blank ballots mailed to the wrong address or to large residential buildings might get intercepted. Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.
While I share all of these concerns, I would like to focus on the problem of ballots mailed to the wrong address. Voter registration lists throughout the country are routinely out of date, containing registrations for voters who no longer live at the stated address, who have died, or who are ineligible under the law for some other reason. This has been a problem for years. A Pew Research Center report issued during the Obama years noted that “[a]pproximately 2.75 million people have active registrations in more than one state,” that “24 million—one of every eight—active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” and that “[m]ore than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active vo
ters.” We know about this problem at Judicial Watch because of our work in enforcing the NVRA. Data states provided to the Election Assistance Commission in 2019 showed hundreds of U.S. counties with voter lists containing more registered voters than there were citizens over the age of eighteen—meaning a registration rate of more than 100 percent. Considering just the part of counties’ voter rolls in excess of 100 percent shows that there are 2.5 million “extra” registrants on our nations’ voter rolls.
In particular, counties throughout the country have high numbers of “inactive” registrations that have not yet been canceled. A registration becomes inactive when a registrant is sent, and fails to respond to, an address confirmation notice. If that registrant does not vote or otherwise contact election officials for the next two general federal elections (from two to four years), that registration is canceled pursuant to the NVRA. During that statutory waiting period the voter is called inactive.
It is crucial to note that an inactive registration can still be voted on Election Day. This does not even require the voter to use a provisional ballot. The voter need only affirm his or her address, and in many states this can be done orally. To be clear, the poll worker asks a voter if he or she lives at the listed address, and the voter says “yes.” At that point, the voter can vote.
Now consider our experience in Los Angeles County, which we sued for noncompliance with the NVRA in 2017. We learned that the state of California had not been removing inactive registrations for twenty years, pursuant to a misguided accommodation reached with Janet Reno’s Justice Department. As a result, Los Angeles County by 2018 had about 1,565,000 inactive registrations—almost one-fourth of all the registrations in the county. Stated differently, the county of Los Angeles alone had more inactive voter registrations than the state of Hawaii has people of every age. And this is not just Judicial Watch’s calculation. These inactive registrations were tallied by Los Angeles County and were openly admitted in the agreement it signed settling the lawsuit. Most had moved long ago. Tens of thousands of these inactive registrants had died. But all currently remain “registered voters.”
Until all of these registrations are formally processed under the NVRA, however, which will not be completed until 2022, they still can be voted in Los Angeles County. But Governor Newsom’s executive order requires county officials to “transmit vote-by-mail ballots for the November 3, 2020 General Election to all voters who are… registered to vote in that election,” making clear that “every Californian who is eligible to vote in the November 3, 2020 General Election shall receive a vote-by-mail ballot.”1 Under the plain terms of Governor Newsom’s order, these 1.6 million inactive registrations, the vast majority of whom no longer reside in Los Angeles County, should receive ballots. Circulating all of those live ballots, unmonitored by their original owners who have moved or died, is a threat to the integrity of California’s elections. (Governor Newsom [and the California state legislature] later backed off this scheme to mail ballots to dead and voters who had moved away in response to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit on behalf of aggrieved California voters and a congressional candidate.)
Many other counties have lists containing old, inactive registrations. Our 2018 consent decree with the commonwealth of Kentucky addressed the hundreds of thousands of outdated registrations in that state. A few months ago, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, admitted that it had nearly 70,000 inactive registrations that it had failed to remove for longer than the NVRA’s statutory waiting period of two general federal elections. It only removed them after receiving a warning letter from Judicial Watch. North Carolina’s own published data shows it has nearly a million inactive registrants. Pennsylvania admits to about 800,000 inactive registrants. Judicial Watch recently commenced lawsuits against both of those states over their failures to clean their voter rolls. If mail-in ballots are sent to the addresses of such inactive voters, there is the danger that they will be improperly voted, at which point they will become “active” again and not subject to removal. Indeed, where states or counties are not cleaning their voter rolls, even their active registrations become outdated.
One of the main reasons the Carter-Baker Commission identified absentee ballot fraud as “the largest source of potential voter fraud” is simple: it poses fewer risks for a person filling out and mailing a fraudulent ballot. By contrast, a person attempting “impersonation” fraud at a polling site must at least appear to cast the vote and, in consequence, may be found out and detained. Even so, a number of recent stories attest to the practice of mail-in ballot fraud. In July 2020, a West Virginia postal worker pled guilty to manipulating eight voters’ absentee ballots. In 2019, an Oakland County clerk outside Detroit was charged with illegally altering 193 absentee ballots. A Minneapolis man was charged with helping thirteen others falsify absentee ballots ahead of the 2018 election. In 2017, a Dallas County, Texas, man was convicted after 700 mail-in ballots were witnessed and signed by a fictitious person. And recently in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race, a scheme was run to steal 1,200 absentee ballots and fill them out, in a race that was decided by only 900 votes.
As a final point, as of this writing, it is about five months now until Election Day, and the pandemic’s infection curve has flattened. Insisting now on all-mail ballot elections seems less like a response to a health crisis and more like a partisan application of the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel: “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste.”
Governor Newsom’s executive order in California seems particularly cynical. While he has relied on his emergency powers in the face of the pandemic to order all-mail ballot elections, he notably has failed to restrict ballot harvesting under state law, which allows paid employees of public sector unions, among others, to go door-to-door gathering ballots from strangers, even helping those voters to fill them out. Public health, in other words, is cited as a justification when it is convenient, and is ignored when it is inconvenient. This is just the kind of self-interested, partisan game playing that causes American voters to react with disgust at how we conduct our elections.
Also testifying was Stacey Abrams, the failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who has made an issue of falsely alleging the election was stolen from her due to “voter suppression.” Her new angle, echoed by leftists throughout the media, is warning that Americans shouldn’t have to choose between “dying and voting.” This capitalizes on the fear of coronavirus and, as I testified, is actually likely to cause actual voter suppression by needlessly (and, I suspect, purposely) scaring Americans from voting in person!
I fear for our elections this year, as there has been a mad, partisan rush for vote-by-mail despite not having systems in place to handle and verify mail ballots.
Judicial Watch is battling against the tide. We must be forthright in describing the problem—the Left wants a free-for-all election system. And such a system will be susceptible to fraud, and as importantly, undermine American’s confidence in the administration of our elections. So not only will be elections be less secure, but you can be sure fewer Americans will be willing to participate in elections without basic safeguards. How long can our republic stand this assault on the franchise?
ARE ALIENS GETTING OUT TO VOTE?
The Left is desperate to downplay the reality that aliens vote in our federal elections contrary to law. We have tens of millions aliens, legal and otherwise in the United States. From there, it is a numbers game—a certain percentage will register to vote and a certain percentage of that number will vote. Honest observers can only argue over the size of the alien voter bloc—not its existence. I explored the issue for our friends at the Daily Caller:2
Leftists and their media outlets have been all too eager to dismiss President Donald Trump’s charge that as many as 5 million illegal aliens voted in the 2016 presidential election, enough to easily swing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
Many of these pundits, backed by an army of so-called “fact-checkers,” would hav
e you believe that the number of illegals who are registering to vote and voting is insignificant. Oh, there may be the occasional, misguided “undocumented worker” who inadvertently wanders into the election booth, they seem to suggest. But, surely, not enough to make any difference.
Anyone who thinks that needs to think again.
There are a total of 43 million noncitizens currently living within U.S. borders. Of these, approximately 12 million are illegal aliens. Not only are there well-documented reasons to believe that many of them may be violating election integrity, the fact is many on the left are more than happy to see them do so. A Rasmussen Reports poll last year found that 53 percent of the Democratic Party supports allowing illegal aliens to vote.
Part of the problem is that election laws in the United States are a complicated hodgepodge of federal, state, and local rules, regulations, and red tape. Generally speaking, it is illegal for any noncitizens to cast a vote in any election, and those who do are at least theoretically subject to criminal penalties if they are caught.
But many states do not have a voter ID requirement. Worse yet, many states do not even have a requirement to certify citizenship, other than saying out loud that you are a citizen. All too many of the systems that are in place to prevent unlawful voting are either nonexistent or are so weak that they are useless. We are naïve to think that the millions of people who are present in the United States illegally are all resisting the temptation to cast unlawful votes, especially when so much is at stake—including their being able to continue residing illegally within our borders.
As I point out in my book Clean House, in 2014 a disturbing study by political scientists at Old Dominion found that 6.4 percent of foreign nationals residing in the United States voted in the 2008 presidential election. If the key Old Dominion study results on the 2008 election were applied to 2016—1.41 million aliens may have voted illegally, with probably 1.13 million voting for Democrats.