Judicial Watch Sues Illinois to Force Clean Up of Voting Rolls

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois’ voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) (Judicial Watch Inc. et al. v. Illinois State Board of Elections et al.(No. 1:24-cv-01867)). The lawsuit requests the court to require Illinois to “develop and implement a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls.”

(Legal pressure from Judicial Watch ultimately led to the removal of up to four million ineligible voters from voter rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere.)

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of Judicial Watch and the nonprofit organizations Illinois Family Action, Breakthrough Ideas, and Carol J. Davis, who is a lawfully registered voter in Illinois.

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)). In July 2023, Judicial Watch successfully sued Illinois for failing to provide access voting list data to a citizens group as federal law requires.

Judicial Watch points out in its current lawsuit that 23 Illinois counties, with a combined registration list of 980,089 voters, reported removing a combined total of only 100 registrations in the last two-year reporting period under a crucial provision of the NVRA. The lawsuit alleges that this is an “absurdly small” number, and contends that there “is no possible way these counties can be conducting a general program that makes reasonable effort to cancel registrations of voters who have become ineligible because of a change of residence while removing so few registrations.”

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.

Judicial Watch notes that 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.

Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

Judicial Watch in February 2024 filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, challenging a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as long as five business days after Election Day.

In December 2023, Judicial Watch sent notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, 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.”

In July 2023, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.

In a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch in July 2023 settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.

In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with Judicial Watch and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.

In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle a Judicial Watch NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.

In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017.

Judicial Watch settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.

Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, Judicial Watch settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.

Illinois Family Action, the non-profit and tax-exempt legislative action arm of Illinois Family Institute, was founded in 2010 to promote the common good and general welfare, primarily by means of education, including direct and grassroots lobbying. IFA works to advance public policies to protect the sanctity of human life, Christian marriage and the natural family, and other initiatives which are consistent with principles of good government.

Breakthrough Ideas is a policy advocacy and education network that advances the causes of peace, prosperity, and freedom by highlighting the virtue of taxpayer-centric and liberty-focused policies and how they benefit all community members.

Judicial Watch was assisted by attorney Christine Svenson, Esq. of Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman LLC.

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