JUST WHO IS GOING TO CLEAN UP THE NATION'S OUTDATED, OVER-COUNTED VOTING ROLLS AHEAD OF THE 2020 ELECTIONS?
Mark Hemmingway
(NationalSentinel) Los Angeles County has too many voters. An estimated 1.6 million, according to the latest calculations – which is roughly the population of Philadelphia. That’s the difference between the number of people on the county’s voter rolls and the actual number of voting age residents.
This means that L.A. is in violation of federal law, which seeks to limit fraud by requiring basic voter list maintenance to make sure that people who have died, moved, or are otherwise ineligible to vote aren’t still on the rolls.
Los Angeles County has made only minimal efforts to clean up its voter rolls for decades. It began sending notices to those 1.6 million people last month to settle a lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Los Angeles County may be California’s worst offender, but 10 of the state’s 58 counties also have registration rates exceeding 100% of the voting age population. In fact, the voter registration rate for the entire state of California is 101%.
And the Golden State isn’t alone. Eight states, as well as the District of Columbia, have total voter registration tallies exceeding 100%, and in total, 38 states have counties where voter registration rates exceed 100%. Another state that stands out is Kentucky, where the voter registration rate in 48 of its 120 counties exceeded 100% last year. About 15% of America’s counties where there is reliable voter data – that is, over 400 counties out of 2,800 – have voter registration rates over 100%.
This echoes a 2012 Pew study that found that 24 million voter registrations in the United States, about one out of every eight, are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate” – a number greater than the current population of Florida or New York state.
Pew’s total included at least 1.8 million dead people and another 2.75 million Americans who were registered to vote in at least two states.
In sum, America’s voter rolls are a mess – and everyone knows it. While voter registration rates over 100% are not proof of fraud, they certainly create opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t exist, such as voting twice in different precincts or the potential for requesting and filling out invalid absentee ballots. At a time when both parties are warning of threats to free and fair elections, obeying federal law by updating the voter rolls would seem to be an easy fix.
Instead, it has become a hot-button issue involving the tension between efforts to expand ballot access and those aimed at securing ballot integrity. The most contentious example occurred in Georgia’s 2018 governor’s race, where Democrat Stacey Abrams has still not formally conceded to now-Gov. Brian Kemp, because during his tenure as secretary of state, she observed, “more than a million citizens found their names stripped from the rolls.”
Abrams’ claim that the election was stolen from her has been repeated by many top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.
Kemp did remove 1.4 million people from the voter rolls, though no evidence of wrongdoing has emerged. Last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried to contact 50 randomly chosen names purged from Georgia’s voter rolls. “Twenty clearly would be ineligible to vote in Georgia: 17 moved out of state, two were convicted of felonies and one had died. Most of the rest left a trail of address changes and disconnected telephone numbers,” the paper reported.
It is, of course, likely that some number of eligible voters were included among those 1.4 million Kemp removed from the rolls – every human activity has an error rate. But experts say such problems are only compounded when states and localities disregard federal law mandating voter list maintenance.
Although the issue has become politicized, the counties and states where voter registrations exceed 100% represent a wide cross-section of urban and rural counties, as well as areas dominated by Republicans and Democrats. Much of this is simply the result of negligence in keeping voter rolls up to date, but a number of state and local governments appear to have left that work undone willfully and along partisan lines.
The tension between ballot access and ballot integrity was clear in 1993 when Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) — sometimes colloquially known as the “Motor Voter Act,” because its best-known provisions enabled people to register to vote at the DMV.
However, streamlining the process to bring in millions of new voters also increased the likelihood of inaccurate voter rolls. The Census Bureau, for example, reports that 11% of Americans move each year. People are far more likely to register to vote in their new homes than to alert their old communities that they have moved.
Since passage of the NVRA, many states have simply ignored the maintenance requirements while others have sought legal workarounds. Robert Popper, a former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, who now works on voting issues for Judicial Watch, said the most aggressive efforts have been led by Democrats. “The willingness of Democratic administrations to just make war on the NVRA is appalling,” said Popper, whose group sued California over its voter roll failures.
California is hardly the only place in America where partisanship is blamed for lack of enforcement of the NVRA. According to Popper, Kentucky’s problems started in 2012 with the election of Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. “At that point, by all accounts, they simply stopped designating people inactive and removing them after two general federal elections,” says Popper. “I mean, just flat-out stopped. And that’s going to screw with your voter list.”
The days of ignoring or misreading the NVRA may be coming to end. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a case challenging Ohio’s voter maintenance laws. At issue was the state’s sending of confirmation notices to verify the registrations of citizens who hadn’t voted in while.
The high court ruled that the act of not voting was an acceptable trigger for deciding to verify someone’s voter registration. Not only that, the ruling was explicit about the intent of the law’s provisions to keep voter rolls accurate.
The effects of the decision were felt almost immediately. On July 16 of last year, just six days after the Husted decision came down, a federal court judge issued a consent decree requiring Kentucky to remove ineligible voters from its rolls, in response to a 2017 lawsuit brought by Popper and Judicial Watch. It was also the impetus for the settlement with Los Angeles County earlier this year, which itself had been sued by Judicial Watch on behalf of four local residents.
Judicial Watch’s role in demanding enforcement of federal law raises another important question: Where has the Justice Department been? With a small number of lawsuits, Judicial Watch has arguably done more to enforce federal voter integrity provisions in the last couple of years than the DoJ has in the last couple of decades.
“[There’s] a cottage industry now of private enforcement of section eight of the NVRA that has arisen from the Justice Department’s utter failure to enforce this federal statute,” notes Popper. The Trump administration Justice Department joined Judicial Watch’s already-in-progress Kentucky lawsuit, but before that, the last section 8 election integrity action brought by the department was a decade ago – initiated by Popper when he worked in the Bush administration.
The Obama DoJ did so little to enforce the law that Justice’s own office of the inspector general investigated the matter. Its report presented evidence that former Obama Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes said at a July 2009 meeting that section 8 cases should not be brought. The report stated:
“Thirteen witnesses told the OIG that Fernandes stated that she ‘did not care about’ or ‘was not interested’ in pursuing Section 8 cases, or similar formulations. For instance, Chris Herren, who was later promoted by current Division leadership to Section Chief, told the OIG that Fernandes made a controversial and ‘very provocative’ statement at this brown bag lunch. In particular, Herren stated that Fernandes stated something to the effect of ‘[Section 8] does nothing to help voters. We have no interest in that.’ … Ten attorneys who attended the meeting told the OIG that they interpreted Fernandes’s comments to be a clear directive that Division leadership would not approve Section 8 list-maintenance cases in the future.”