‘Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A year to the date that Judicial Watch reported it had forced California to clean roughly 1.5 million inactive voters off its rolls, the government accountability watchdog said that it had identified another 2.5 million “extra” voters.
That effectively eradicates the 2.8 million popular-vote margin that Hillary Clinton officially bested President Donald Trump by in the 2016 election by, with many more votes to spare.
Last week, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton announced the results of a recent data analysis using records released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Nationwide, it found 378 counties that had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18.
It also found major issues in 19 counties spanning five different states—potentially putting them in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires them to keep their voting logs up-to-date.
“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections,” Fitton said in a statement, “and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls.”
California Leads the Way
Once again, California is the worst offender with 11 counties in violation.
Conservatives have written off the hope of reclaiming the state, which (apart from the centrist Arnold Schwarzenegger) has followed a trend going increasingly off the deep end of progressive politics for the past three decades.
However, as the 2016 election proved, liberals can still use the state to buffer their supposed popular-vote lead with invalid ballots—and they have actively pursued strategies for doing so, such as ballot harvesting.
Ironically, despite the Left’s national crusade against Republican legislative redistricting, California’s egregious gerrymandering also played a role in shaping the state’s political landscape.
Several of the counties affected by the recent inactive-voter issues were ones that have traditionally been bastions of conservatism.
This includes areas like the anti-“sanctuary state” sanctuary of Stanislaus County, which is home to Modesto, and others in the agriculture-heavy Central Valley.
Also included among the areas in violation of the NVRA is Orange County, the conservative stronghold south of Los Angeles that has been in Democrats’ cross-hairs lately.
While only seven Republicans are currently included in the state’s 52-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, the ouster of prominent conservative incumbents like Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Ed Royce in the SoCal suburbs—on the front lines of the immigration crisis—has given Democrats hope of claiming even more seats in the elections to come.
Meanwhile, as Republicans take flight to “redder pastures,” their votes are being left behind for someone else, according to Judicial Watch’s analysis.
Targeting the Battleground States
The four other states identified as having major voter-roll issues are all ones that, until recently, had been considered red.
Now, however, all are either blue states or ones that the Left considers “up for grabs.”
Three of the four (Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania) have been subject to major redistricting lawsuits.
As the Trump administration also plans to draw from publicly available information, such as comparing DMV and voter records, to complete its count of legal versus illegal residents in the upcoming census, the odds of something going awry as the result of inaccurate records is fairly strong.
Two of the states in question (North Carolina and Pennsylvania) swung for Trump in 2016 but are at serious risk of flipping in the upcoming election.
The others (Virginia and Colorado) have only recently moved into the blue column, largely based on the migration into major urban areas.
Not coincidentally, the counties representing those states on Judicial Watch’s list happen to have an outsize influence in the state’s leftward political shifts.
The Washington, DC, exurb of Fairfax—one of Virginia’s largest and most affluent counties, and home to many deep-state bureaucrats—has long been the staging ground of Democrat electoral shenanigans.
The last to count its ballots on election day, it has been a difference-maker in close calls such as the state’s controversial 2013 race that put former Clinton stooge Terry McAuliffe in the governor’s mansion.
Also elected in 2013 by a razor-thin margin—only after a bag of misplaced ballots was found in the trunk of a car in a Fairfax park—was the state’s current attorney general, Mark Herring.
Since Democrats successfully flipped the state’s General Assembly last November, Herring is now leading Virginia’s current gun-confiscation efforts and other measures to enforce a newly radicalized leftist agenda.
Jefferson County, Colorado, meanwhile, lies on the western outskirts of Denver, at the ridge of the Rocky Mountains .
The 7th Congressional District largely comprises it went Democrat in 2007, after GOP Rep. Bob Beauprez resigned to run for governor, and has remained that way since, growing bluer with each passing election.
Putting the Pressure On
Judicial Watch said it sent notice-of-violation letters to the counties it found in potential NVRA noncompliance.
In addition to the massive California settlement last year, Fitton said that the group’s lawsuits have aided cleanups in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio—with the latter resulting from a Supreme Court ruling.
“It is common sense that voters who die or move away be removed from the voting rolls,” he said.
But some areas—such as San Diego, with 117 percent of its population registered to vote—continue to resist.
Fitton went into more depth about Judicial Watch’s efforts during his weekly video update last week, which also addressed Democrats’ efforts to falsely claim recent events in Baghdad as President Donald Trump’s Benghazi, and the organization’s lawsuit to expose the so-called Ukraine whistleblower’s deep-state ties.