“Dirty Voter Rolls, Dirty Elections”: Illinois Sued To Clean Up “Mess”

Illinois is being sued over its failure to clean up the state’s voter rolls and produce election-related records as required under federal law.

Legal watchdog organization Judicial Watch announced on Wednesday that they want Illinois to “develop and implement a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls.”

According to JW, the National Voter Registration Act requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have either died or changed residence – and that registrations must be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices, followed by subsequent no-shows in the next two general elections.

Pas efforts by Judicial Watch have led to the removal of up to four million ineligible voters from rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina and several other states.

Judicial Watch points out:

• Illinois’ own reported data show that more than one fifth of its counties removed few or no registrations under a crucial NVRA provision concerning voters who have moved.
• Illinois informed the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that 34 counties simply failed to report any data about removals under that key NVRA provision
• Nineteen of these counties also failed to report any data regarding registrations removed because of the death of the voter.
• Dozens of other counties failed to report other kinds of important NVRA data to the EAC.

Further (via Judicial Watch):

Counties typically do not ignore their reporting obligations to the EAC where the data is favorable to them. Rather, this failure suggests non-compliance with the NVRA. In all, 66 of Illinois’ 108 jurisdictions – or 60% of them – either reported fewer unusually low NVRA removals or failed to report a crucial data category to the EAC. These jurisdictions contain a total of 5.8 million registered voters, or about two thirds of Illinois’ 8.8 million registered voters.

In its complaint, Judicial Watch references a Notice Letter sent in November 2023 to Matthews before filing suit. This letter recounted these failures, and also observed that recent census estimates of citizens over the age of eighteen “suggests that 15 Illinois jurisdictions have more voter registrations than citizens of voting age.”

“Illinois’ voting rolls are a mess. Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Illinois should take immediate steps to clean its rolls to both prevent fraud and increase voter confidence in the elections.”

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in across the country, among other achievements.