About 5 million ineligible names were removed from voter registration rolls across the United States since 2019, Judicial Watch announced–with almost 1 million of those coming from New York City.
The conservative-leaning government watchdog group has taken legal action against state and local governments for voter list maintenance under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which includes a requirement that election officials clear voter lists of the names of dead people, as well as the names of people that moved to another jurisdiction.
“Judicial Watch’s clean-up of over five million dirty names from voter rolls is a historic achievement for clean elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a public statement. “I have no doubt that Judicial Watch’s election integrity heavy lifting helped stop the steal in 2024. But there are millions of more names to be removed from voting rolls, which is why we are in federal court in three states.”
New York City, as part of a 2022 settlement with Judicial Watch, removed 918,139 ineligible names from its voter rolls. In February, the city announced 477,056 names were removed since March 2023. Previously, the city announced removing 441,083, according to Judicial Watch.
In a March court filing, the Kentucky Board of Elections reported on its progress since the 2018 consent decree with Judicial Watch.
“Consistent with the NVRA’s purposes ‘to protect the integrity of the electoral process’ and ‘to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained,’ the State Board of Elections has, since 2019, removed roughly 735,000 ineligible voter registrations from the voter rolls,” the Kentucky court filing from March 28 says.
“In its continuous efforts since 2019 to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls for the citizens of the Commonwealth, the Board proceeded with its standard practice of removing those voters who had died, been convicted of a felony, been declared incompetent, moved out of state, or who had duplicate registrations.”
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details fraud cases in misusing the names of deceased or otherwise ineligible voters whose names remain on the voters lists. This included convictions in Texas, Washington state, and Kansas of politicians and operatives related to false voter registration. It also details a 2013 sting operation by the New York City Department of Investigation in which investigators went to the polls signing in with the names of dead people, convicted felons no longer eligible to vote, or people who had moved out of the city, with no pushback from election workers.
The more recent numbers provided by New York City and Kentucky come on top of reporting from Los Angeles County in May 2022, confirming it removed 1.2 million ineligible names from its rolls as part of a settlement from a 2017 Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In addition, the states of Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio have also removed ineligible names from the rolls because of legal pressure, according to Judicial Watch.
