Watchdog to states: Clean up voter rolls or be invited into court
Texas just days ago confirmed that it has removed more than a million ineligible voters from its voter registration rolls.
And an election integrity watchdog now is pushing other states to address problems with their records as well.
The Washington Stand reports that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed “noncitizens, deceased voter and people who moved to another state” have been deleted.
That means they no longer can vote in Texas, short of a move back.
But with the November election not even three months away, J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation wants other states to make at least the same effort.
Or else they could end up in court.
“[W]hat if these one million ineligible voters were not removed from the voter rolls in Texas?” he commented during an interview on Washington Watch. “I will tell you that that would be called Michigan. … [W]e’ve been in litigation against Michigan because Secretary [of State] Jocelyn Benson won’t remove at least 2[7],000 dead voters from the voter rolls. … We’re now in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals against her. … [That] 27,000 [number] was only looking at people over the age of 70. So if you died at the age of 40 or 50 or 55 or 60, even in Michigan, we wouldn’t have necessarily made that part of our lawsuit. So it’s clearly more than 27,000.”
Adams explained Texas is among the leaders in “making sure that the elections are clean.”
“For example, they have a law there that if you just go out and register voters, you have to get training, you have to get deputized, and you can’t engage in bad conduct. And of course, the Left challenged this law in court, and it was upheld,” he said.
Nor, he said during the interview, are there grounds for leftist talking points that pursuing election integrity is “voter suppression.”
“I always like to point out that ‘suppression’ is a fake word — it’s not in any federal law. It’s a made-up word by the Left … to attempt to blend the legal with the illegal. So if you have voter ID [laws], it’s ‘voter suppression.’ If you clean voter rolls, it’s ‘voter suppression.’ And it sounds very nefarious, [but] it doesn’t exist in the law. What does exist is intimidation, coercion, and threats. There’s no such thing as voter suppression.”
He continued, “[S]tates that are cleaning their voter rolls are following federal law. States have an obligation to follow federal law and have a reasonable maintenance program that removes the dead and people who moved away. And kudos to [states like] Texas, Florida, [and] Ohio that have good laws in place and good practices to make our elections secure.”
The report explained Adams highlighted Nevada as a problem that remains.
“It breaks my heart to see how bad things have gotten in Nevada, because you have automatic mail voting … where everybody on the voter rolls, even if they don’t ask, gets a ballot mailed to them at their last known address, and those ballots are going out by the hundreds of thousands without request. And what we have found is that Nevada has lots of commercial addresses where those ballots are going improperly — strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, liquor stores. A Sonic drive-in in Las Vegas had a purported registered voter. We visited these places. … And what we did is we sued Clark County and also Washoe County, which is Reno. But Clark thankfully took steps to fix this problem.”
Colorado is another state where leftists have set up a system for mail voting, where ballots are dispatched en masse.
He said sending ballots to all, including those “not alive anymore” can push the voting outcome.
“You had a U.S. Senate race with Adam Laxalt [that] was decided by only 7,000 votes. In that same race, we knew that 95,000 ballots went unaccounted for. We don’t know what happened to them. Garbage cans, dumpsters, whatever. And so it’s just the wrong way to be picking leaders by automatically mailing ballots to every single person on the list,” he said.
He pointed out that his organization has 19 active lawsuits over election integrity.
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