Big Election Integrity Victory

New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!
Happy New Year!

New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

We just 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 to clean its voter registration lists in the future.

We filed the lawsuit in July after the city failed to clean voter rolls for years. The lawsuit, filed under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), pointed out that New York City removed only 22 names under federal law over six years (Judicial Watch v Valentine et al. (No.1:22-cv-03952)).

Our suit detailed how New York City’s “own recent data concedes that there were only 22 total” removals under this provision “during a six-year period, in a city of over 5.5 million voters. These are ludicrously small numbers of removals given the sizable populations of these counties.”

Moreover, the “almost complete failure of Kings, Queens, New York, Bronx, and Richmond Counties, over a period of at least six years, to remove voters” under a key provision of federal law “means that there are untold numbers of New York City registrations for voters who are ineligible to vote at their listed address because they have changed residence or are otherwise ineligible to vote.”

The settlement details how the city responded to our notice about its voting roll deficiencies with a massive clean-up:

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that, in February 2022, they removed, pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA, 82,802 registrations in Bronx County, 128,093 in Kings County, 145,891 in New York County, 66,010 in Queens County, and 18,287 in Richmond County, for a total of 441,083 registrations.

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that going forward they intend to cancel registrations pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) in each odd-numbered year in the months following a federal election.

Specifically, the city also agrees to track in detail and report its voter roll maintenance efforts through 2025:

For both 2023 and 2025 … the [Board of Elections] will notify Judicial Watch … on or before March 31, by means of separate excel spreadsheets for Bronx County, Kings County, New York County, Queens County, and Richmond County, of the number of removals, including removals pursuant to … the NVRA, made during the previous two years.

The NVRA requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. Among other things, 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)).

This historic settlement is a major victory for New York voters who will benefit from cleaner voter rolls and more honest elections. We are pleased that New York City officials quickly acted to remove 441,000 outdated registrations from the rolls. We look forward to working together under this federal lawsuit settlement to ensure New York City maintains cleaner rolls for future elections.

We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.

California settled an NVRA lawsuit with us and began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to Maryland’s Democratic legislature’s “extreme” congressional redistricting gerrymander.

In May 2022, we sued Illinois on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered Illinois voters to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.

Robert Popper, Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our 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.

Happy New Year!

As we welcome the new year, we recall a few of our successes in 2022:

We made it more likely that voters in North Carolina will have cleaner elections, and we are making headway for voters in Illinois by challenging its election law permitting mail-in ballots to be received as long as two weeks after Election Day.

We scored a win against two unconstitutional California quota mandates for sex, race, ethnicity, and LGBT status requirements for corporate boards.

We continue to uncover unsettling information regarding COVID-19, including the Biden administration’s extensive media plan for a propaganda campaign to push the vaccine.

I anticipate that Judicial Watch will carry its largest and most important caseload in our 29-year history into 2023 and engage our full arsenal of research, investigations and litigation into critically important public policy fronts. For example, uncovering critical race theory in our public institutions:

We successfully settled a civil rights lawsuit that we filed on behalf of a Massachusetts teacher who lost his position as head football coach after raising concerns about the promotion of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter propaganda in his daughter’s seventh-grade history class.

We uncovered critical race theory instructional materials from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, including a PowerPoint slide with a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.” We are pursuing similar lawsuits against the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy to see if they are teaching similar racist, anti-American propaganda.

We’re certainly eager to learn more about Hunter Biden and apparent efforts by the administration to block investigations.

After the Allied victory over Hitler in 1945, but before the victory over Japan, Winston Churchill found himself in a similar situation of looking both back and forward. He declared: “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, butlet us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead.”

Dark clouds hang over our country, but they only motivate us. As Churchill also observed, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

We are grateful that you are with us as we enter 2023. All of us wish you and yours a Happy New Year!

I hope you’ll make a special New Year’s contribution in support of our essential work ahead.

Until next week …