Investigation Finds 131 Percent of Eligible Voters Registered in Washington, DC

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has done a deep dive into the voter rolls of Washington, DC and some other places and found an absolute mess.

In Washington, DC, eligible voters are registered at a rate of 131%, violating standards of basic math.

It’s probably just an oversight, right? It couldn’t be a problem of fraud or anything nefarious.

The Washington Examiner reported:

‘Dirty voter rolls’ slammed, 131% of eligible DC voters registered

Several states and the District of Columbia have been hit by an election watchdog for failing to clean up their voter rolls of the dead and ineligible.

Judicial Watch said it just finished investigating registrations and sent letters to the district, California, and Illinois warning that they are violating the National Voter Registration Act by not cleaning up the rolls.

In the case of Washington, D.C., Judicial Watch said the voting rolls revealed a much higher number than are eligible to vote.

“D.C.’s total registration rate — its total number of registrations divided by the most recent census estimates of its citizen voting-age population — is greater than 131%,” said the review.

But Judicial Watch also gave credit to the district for moving quickly after receiving its letter to begin removing 103,000 names of ineligible voters. California and Illinois have promised to clean up their rolls.

According to Judicial Watch, they are already getting results on this:

DC Removing 103,000 Ineligible Names from the Voter Rolls in Response to Judicial Watch

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it sent notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letters point out that these jurisdictions publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letters threaten federal lawsuits unless the violations are corrected in a timely fashion. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, DC, officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”

The NVRA 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 died or changed residence. The law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., 138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).

Just another case of citizens doing a job the government is supposed to do.

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Mike LaChance has been covering higher education and politics for Legal Insurrection since 2012. Since 2008 he has contributed work to the Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Center for Security Policy, the Washington Free Beacon, and Ricochet. He has also written for American Lookout, Townhall, and Twitchy.

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