Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Tug-of-war continues over cutting names from voter rolls

Voter registration

Judicial Watch is threatening legal action against 19 large counties across five states, claiming the jurisdictions have not followed federal law requiring maintenance of voter registration lists.

SDI Productions/Getty Images

Republican politicians and conservative groups are accelerating their push to remove names from voter rolls across the country in what has quickly become a major new partisan battleground ahead of the next election.

Proponents of cleaning up the rolls claim the lists are filled in some places with the names of people who are not eligible to vote because they have moved or died. This creates the opportunity for fraud, they argue. Democrats counter that such "purging" ends up removing many thousands of qualified voters and is a thinly veiled attempt by the GOP to reduce the numbers of potential Democratic voters.

The latest developments came last week when a conservative group, Judicial Watch, sent letters threatening to sue 19 large counties — 11 of them in California — for not following the federal law that outlines how lists are to be maintained.


The letters from Judicial Watch went to counties in five states — California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia — where the number of registered voters exceeds the most recent Census Bureau estimate of the voting age population. These include San Diego and San Francisco counties, Fairfax County in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, the county centered on Charlotte in North Carolina and the county that includes Pittsburgh.

Judicial Watch says its analysis of federal data found 378 counties — almost one out of every eight nationwide — where the number of voters registered exceeds the estimated voting age population.

"Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls," said the group's president, Tom Fitton.

But Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, warns in a posting on the Election Law Blog that comparing the number of registrations to the estimated adult population is "bad science."

First, he argues, the two data sets measure different things. Many members of the military or college students who may be counted for census purposes in the places where they're stationed or going to school, for example, may nonetheless be registered to vote in their hometowns. In addition, the two counts are conducted in different ways. While a firm count of people registered to vote in a jurisdiction can be done at any time, the voting age populations are estimates by the Census Bureau that include a margin of error, and are often several years behind the current voter registration count.

"To be abundantly clear: accurate list maintenance is good hygiene, and beneficial. Inaccurate list maintenance based on flawed measures of problems is medical malpractice," Levitt wrote last week.

Judicial Watch has been successful in suing to force cleanups of voter registration rolls in California, Kentucky and Ohio under the National Voter Registration Act. The 1993 law is more widely known as the Motor Voter Act for its best-known provision, requiring people be given an opportunity to register when they get or renew a driver's license. But it also sets out the method by which names can be removed from voter rolls, requiring election officials to send notices to voters who appear to have moved and have skipped several elections.

Recently, efforts to remove hundreds of thousands of names from the voter registration rolls in Georgia and Ohio have been the subject of legal challenges.

In both states, thousands of those removals were found to be mistaken.

Read More

Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.
A pile of political buttons sitting on top of a table

Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.

Once again, politicians are trying to choose their voters to guarantee their own victories before the first ballot is cast.

In the latest round of redistricting wars, Texas Republicans are attempting a rare mid-decade redistricting to boost their advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Democratic governors in California and New York are signaling they’re ready to “fight fire with fire” with their own partisan gerrymanders.

Keep ReadingShow less
Stolen Land, Stolen Votes: Native Americans Defending the VRA Protects Us All – and We Should Support Them

Wilson Deschine sits at the "be my voice" voter registration stand at the Navajo Nation annual rodeo, in Window Rock.

Getty Images, David Howells

Stolen Land, Stolen Votes: Native Americans Defending the VRA Protects Us All – and We Should Support Them

On July 24, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a Circuit Court order in a far-reaching case that could affect the voting rights of all Americans. Native American tribes and individuals filed the case as part of their centuries-old fight for rights in their own land.

The underlying subject of the case confronts racial gerrymandering against America’s first inhabitants, where North Dakota’s 2021 redistricting reduced Native Americans’ chances of electing up to three state representatives to just one. The specific issue that the Supreme Court may consider, if it accepts hearing the case, is whether individuals and associations can seek justice under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). That is because the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, contradicting other courts, said that individuals do not have standing to bring Section 2 cases.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trojan Horse: How CA Democrats Might Use Voter ID To Turn Back the Clock

Voter IDs are a requirement in almost every democracy in the world. But legitimate concerns over voter suppression efforts in the American south led to a different ethic inside Democratic Party circles.

Image generated by IVN staff.

Trojan Horse: How CA Democrats Might Use Voter ID To Turn Back the Clock

Voter IDs are a requirement in almost every democracy in the world from Europe to Mexico.

But legitimate concerns over voter suppression efforts in the American south led to a different ethic inside Democratic Party circles. Over time, Voter ID plans have been presumptively conflated with claims of “voter suppression” without much analysis of the actual impact of proposals.

Keep ReadingShow less
Person voting

New York City’s election has gotten a lot of attention over the last few weeks, and ranked choice voting is a big part of the reason why.

Hill Street Studios/Getty Images

New York City’s Ranked Choice Voting: Democracy That’s Accountable to Voters

New York City’s election has gotten a lot of attention over the last few weeks, and ranked choice voting is a big part of the reason why.

Heads turned when 33-year-old state legislator Zohran Mamdani knocked off Andrew Cuomo, a former governor from one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent families. The earliest polls for the mayoral primary this winter found Mamdani struggling to reach even 1 percent.

Keep ReadingShow less