Judicial Watch to Monitor Wisconsin Polls; Stands Up National Election Fraud Report Line For Voters to Report Voting Issues

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that, as part of its ongoing election integrity efforts, its trained observers will monitor polling sites in Wisconsin on November 5. Separately, Judicial Watch will run an Internet hotline for voters in all states to report suspicions of election and voter fraud.

Judicial Watch monitors elections to ensure compliance with state and federal laws. Judicial Watch’s election observers have monitored many state and national elections and have been certified and served as international election observers.

Judicial Watch’s lead election law attorney Robert Popper established the organization’s election monitoring program. Popper is a former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and a veteran poll observer for the Department of Justice.

Separately, Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Hotline allows voters who witness any suspicious activity at their polling place, have issues with a voting machine, or witness voter fraud or intimidation to send a detailed email to Judicial Watch at: [email protected].

“Judicial Watch’s teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

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 across the country among other achievements.

In July 2024, Judicial Watch announced it sent a notice letter to the Oregon secretary of state on behalf of itself, the Constitution Party of Oregon and an Oregon registered voter, notifying them of evident violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, based on their failure to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls. The letter to Oregon serves as a “pre-suit” notice.

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. Among other things, the NVRA 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)).

A hearing was recently held in another case filed by Judicial Watch that challenges a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as late as five business days after Election Day. 

In May 2024, Judicial Watch sued California to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).

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

Judicial Watch filed the latest lawsuit after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of California counties.

In December 2023, Judicial Watch sent three other 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. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, D.C., 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.

Judicial Watch in July 2023 also 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 now 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 extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.

In March 2023, Judicial Watch 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.

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.

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.

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