Watchdog group Judicial Watch (JW) sent out warning letters Monday to 11 states with counties in where the registered voters outnumbers voting-age citizens, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011-2015 American Community Survey.
According to the letters, this is “strong circumstantial evidence that these … counties are not conducting reasonable voter registration record maintenance as mandated under the [National Voter Registration Act] NVRA.”
The NVRA and the federal Help America Vote Act require states to make reasonable efforts to maintain accurate voting rolls.
The 11 states that Judicial Watch sent a letter to are: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Tennessee.
According to JW, these states have 90 days after receipt of the letters to address the issue and give JW documentation showing that they have put forth a “statewide effort to conduct a program that reasonably ensures the lists of eligible voters are accurate.”
The watchdog told the eleven states if they fail to take steps to clean up their voter rolls to correct violations of Section 8 of the NVRA, JW would file a lawsuit.
Section 8 of the NVRA mandates that states take reasonable actions to eliminate the names of ineligible voters from official lists due to “the death of the registrant” or “a change in the residence of the registrant,” and requires states to make certain that non-citizens are not registered to vote.
Judicial Watch asked the states to “conduct or implement a systematic, uniform, nondiscriminatory program to remove from the list of eligible voters the names of persons who have become ineligible to vote by reason of a change of residence, death or a disqualifying criminal conviction.”
The states are also asked to remove from voter registration lists “noncitizens who have registered to vote unlawfully.”
“Dirty election rolls can mean dirty elections,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These 11 states face possible Judicial Watch lawsuits unless they follow the law and take reasonable steps to clean up their voting rolls of dead, moved, and non-citizen voters.”
Judicial Watch forced Indiana to clean up its voter rolls after winning a legal victory in court back in 2014.