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Judicial Watch Warns Oregon to Clean Voter
Registration Lists or Face Federal Lawsuit
Election law is simple. But many don’t want to follow it for reasons we
can all guess. The National Voter
Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 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 canceled 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)).
We sent a notice
letter to the Oregon secretary of state on behalf of ourselves,
the Constitution Party of Oregon and an Oregon registered voter, notifying
them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to
remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. Our notice letter to
Oregon serves as a “pre-suit” notice.
The letter states:
According to your state’s responses to the EAC’s [federal
government’s Election Assistance Commission] survey, 19 Oregon counties
reported removing zero voter registrations from November 2020 to November
2022 pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA for failing to respond to a
Confirmation Notice and failing to vote in two consecutive general federal
elections. Another 10 counties reported just a handful of such removals
during the same two-year period.
Furthermore, not a single
one of Oregon’s 36 counties reported any data whatsoever to the EAC
regarding inactive registrations. Instead, in the relevant column where the
data should have been, the survey response for each of Oregon’s counties
merely stated, “Data not available.”
***
Oregon’s non-compliance with the NVRA is further illustrated by the
unusually high registration rates observed in several of its counties.
Comparing the data your state reported to the EAC regarding the total
registrations for each county to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent
five-year estimates of the numbers of resident citizens over the age of
eighteen suggests that eight Oregon counties have more voter registrations
than citizens of voting age. Several federal courts have determined that
such high registration rates are sufficient grounds for alleging a failure
to comply with the NVRA’s requirement to make reasonable efforts to
remove voters by reason of death or change of address.
States are required by federal law to report data concerning their removal
programs to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Every few
years the EAC publishes this data as part of a report it provides to
Congress. The most recent report and accompanying datasets were released
in June of this year.
Dirty election rolls can mean dirty elections. With a presidential election
less than four months away, it is vital that Oregon get about the business
of cleaning its voter registration rolls of ineligible voters to eliminate
any cloud of doubt over the legitimacy of its balloting.
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
across the country, among other
achievements.
Robert Popper, our 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.
A hearing was recently held in another case we filed
that challenges a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to
be received as late as five business days after Election Day.
In May 2024, we sued California to clean up its voter rolls. The
lawsuit, filed on behalf of us 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 December 2023, we 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 our 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 we 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 we conducted in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate
was 101% of eligible voters.
In July 2023, we 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 us and admitted in court filings that
it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications
from us. 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, we 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 our NVRA lawsuit alleging that
Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement
agreement requires Colorado to provide us with the most recent voter roll
data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible
voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement
agreement in a federal lawsuit we filed in 2017.
We 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 of our
lawsuits.
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 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in
favor of our challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s
“extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
This leadership for election integrity only happens because of the generous
support of our members. If you aren’t a part of Judicial Watch’s cause
and movement, I encourage you to support us right here! And if you have
already supported our work, thank you – and I encourage you to make
another donation because you know the fight never stops!
Judicial Watch Suit Seeks Edited Transcripts of Biden Special Counsel
Interviews
The Biden Justice Department is engaged in a major league cover-up for Joe
Biden. Hiding audio recordings, altering transcripts, and ignoring FOIA law
shows that the Biden team is desperate to avoid disclosure about Joe
Biden’s cognitive condition.
We just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice for
records of communication between the agency and the White House regarding
the altered transcripts of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s October 2023
interviews of President Biden in the criminal investigation into Biden’s
theft and disclosure of classified records (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02176)). The lawsuit is one of
three federal FOIA lawsuits we filed this week concerning the Hur
investigation.
(In a separate lawsuit, we forced the Biden administration to admit that the transcripts of the audio
recordings have been altered and are not accurate.)
We filed the lawsuit after the Justice Department inadequately responded to
a FOIA request on June 1, 2024, for:
All records of communication between any official or employee of the
Department of Justice and any official or employee of the Executive Office
of the President regarding the creation, editing, or release of the
transcript of the interviews of President Biden by Special Counsel Robert
Hur on October 8, 2023 and October 9, 2023. This request includes, but is
not limited to, all such communications including Mr. Hur and/or any other
official or employee assigned to or employed by Mr. Hur’s office.
All records of communication between any
official or employee of the Department of Justice and the court reporter(s)
responsible for the creation or editing of the transcripts of the
interviews described in part one of this request and/or any other officer,
employee, or representative of Free State Reporting, Inc. This request
includes, but is not limited to, all such communications including Mr. Hur
and/or any other official or employee assigned to or employed by Mr.
Hur’s office.
All directions, instructions, or other
guidance documents provided to the court reporter(s) responsible for the
creation or editing of the transcripts of the interviews described in part
one of this request and/or any other officer, employee, or representative
of Free State Reporting, Inc. regarding the creation or editing of those
transcripts.
Also this week, we filed two other FOIA lawsuits, one for the background
materials referenced in Hur’s
February 2020 report (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02177) and one for all communications
about the Hur report with the Office of the White House Counsel and
Biden’s personal lawyers (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02179)).
On February 5, 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur issued the “Report of the Special Counsel on
the Investigation Into Unauthorized Removal, Retention, and Disclosure of
Classified Documents Discovered at Locations Including the Penn Biden
Center and the Delaware Private Residence of President Joseph R. Biden,
Jr.”
In the report, Hur called Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor
memory” and declined to charge Biden with a “serious
felony:”
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present
himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic,
well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct
interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many
jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to
convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president
well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of
willfulness.
Prior to the finalization of the report, the White House issued a
letter to the Special Counsel’s office attacking the
report’s “treatment of President Biden’s memory,” and added
“there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well
in answering your questions …”
And with all the well-placed concern about Joe Biden’s cognitive status,
the public interest in the release of the tapes is as important than
ever. The court could rule at any time so check back for updates!
Statement on President Biden’s Decision to Step Down from the
Presidential Campaign
President Joe Biden’s resignation from the presidential race is the
result of a corrupt, arrogant, and anti-democratic process. Biden was
forced to pull out of the presidential race as the result of a dangerously
corrupt pressure campaign led by Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and like-minded
Democrats, which has effectively disenfranchised 14 million Americans who
voted in the Democratic presidential primaries.
Few Americans will buy the DC establishment’s scheme to remove Biden from
the presidential campaign over cognitive issues while ignoring his
inability to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Vice President Kamala Harris and the majority of the cabinet need to step
up and invoke the 25th Amendment. And, Congress should do an
emergency investigation into Biden’s fitness for office. The
assassination attempt on former President Trump adds increased urgency to
ensure we have a fully capable president. This is truly a national security
crisis.
And to make matters worse, we have this “coup against democracy,” as
the Left likes to say. We are not going to know who the nominee of the
Democratic Party for the office of president of the United States will be
until August. It’s election interference, pure and simple. There is
nothing about this process that’s normal, appropriate or honest.
A snap national primary (or primaries) to pick a new nominee would seem to
be the most “democratic” approach to Biden’s decision not to seek
reelection. At a minimum, a careful state-by-state and federal legal
analysis is a necessary first step to help determine whether Biden can be
replaced on the presidential ballot at this late stage in the presidential
campaign. Judicial Watch is already investigating this election integrity
issue. That the votes of 14 million Americans would be casually tossed
aside by Democratic Party elites is a major corruption and election
interference scandal.
Pentagon DEI Budget Surges for Woke Training to Root out ‘White
Privilege’
Our Corruption Chronicles blog has carefully documented the
dangerous woke ideology ruining our military. As you can see from our
latest report, the Leftist
abuse and waste seem to be getting worse:
The Pentagon dedicates tens of millions of dollars annually to Critical
Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs
throughout the armed forces and cadets at the nation’s military academies
receive extensive training about racism, sexism, unconscious bias, and
intersectionality.
A year-long research project conducted by a
special commission at a public university think tank has uncovered the
unbelievable details behind a costly Department of Defense (DOD) initiative
to root out so-called white privilege white supremacy in the military. The
study, conducted by the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State
University (ASU), began as a review of civic education in the military and
uncovered a fervent woke movement throughout the nation’s armed forces.
“Our research team did not expect to find Critical Race Theory so
embedded and pervasive,” the center’s director, Donald T. Critchlow, an
ASU American political history professor, writes in the introduction of a
recently published report. He
confirms that there is CRT and DEI training across the military from the
Pentagon through the ranks.
It is important to note that the sole
purpose of the U.S. armed forces is to defend the nation against external
enemies, therefore the DOD’s mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and
ensure the country’s security. The agency is the government’s largest
with 3.4 million service members and civilians—in the Army, Marine Corps,
Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard—stationed at 4,800 sites in
over 160 countries. Under the Biden administration the DOD budget for DEI
training has increased significantly from $68 million in fiscal year 2022
to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023, the report states. The agency is
requesting a whopping $114.7 million for fiscal year 2024, according to DOD
figures obtained by ASU researchers. “Training is implemented by a vast
DEI bureaucracy that extends from senior leaders at the Pentagon to the
lowest ranks,” the report says, adding that the “U.S. military now has
a well-developed, taxpayer-funded DEI bureaucracy dedicated to rooting out
‘white privilege’ and white supremacy, and that allows for (and
sometimes teaches) the overt criticism of the United States, its founding,
its founders, and its founding documents, alleging that they are all rooted
in systemic racism.”
Few training modules are available to the
public, but the report includes enough to get the full picture. The Air
Force teaches airmen to use proper pronouns as an element of inclusion and
its Air Combat Command toolkit features examinations of white privilege. An
Army course on race and gender in American military history defines racism
as a possibility for a dominant group, while people of color merely express
prejudice and gender as a social construct. The Navy promotes a
“sailor’s drag show aboard a warship” and its anti-extremist training
considers the violent and radical Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to be a
positive, apolitical public policy issue. A Marine Corps CRT course
emphasizes diversity and inclusion while claiming that colorblindness is
unsound because it protects white supremacy. The Marine Corps has also
launched a special initiative “to eradicate racism, sexism, and negative
biases that diminish our warfighting effectiveness.”
The military academies all have federally
mandated offices of diversity and inclusion that coordinate training and
support based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and promote
celebrations based on those identities. West Point offers a minor in
diversity and inclusion studies and courses such as “social inequality”
as well as classes that focus on feminist and queer theory. The Air Force
Academy has a Transgender Working Group and U.S. history is an optional
elective while required classes cover BLM, the New York Times’ 1619
project that aims to “reframe the country’s history by placing the
consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the
very center of the United States” and white fragility. The Naval Academy
requires faculty to attend a diversity and inclusion conference and future
Humanities and Social Sciences instructors to submit diversity statements
describing how they will contribute to the academy’s diversity and
inclusion mission.
In the last few years we have sued the DOD
to obtain more information about the military’s outrageous DEI
initiatives, including anti-American CRT propaganda at three academies. In
2022 we received hundreds of pages of records outlining CRT instruction at West Point that includes material
on “whiteness,” a social science class on race, gender, and sexuality
that focuses on queer theory, and a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN
THE USA.” Months later, we obtained the Air Force
Academy’s CRT
training of cadets that
shows the academy has made race and gender instruction a top priority. This
includes a race, gender and sexuality course as a core class and mandatory
training for cadets and staff on DEI concepts and skills to decrease
incidents of microaggressions and unconscious bias. A cultural immersion
movie nights initiative was also launched to teach cadets about racism,
racial discrimination and the several historical events and policies that
have impacted minorities through cinema.
Who Is Kamala Harris?
Our chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison covers the rise of Kamal
Harris (and certain fact the Big Media don’t want you to know) in
Judicial Watch’s Investigative Bulletin:
The world will quickly be getting to know presumptive Democratic Party
presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Her long relationship—personal and
political—with the scandal-scarred California power broker Willie Brown
is instructive. Brown was instrumental in Harris’s rise in California
politics. In return, she may have protected him and his allies from
damaging investigations.
Brown rose through the ranks of the
California State Assembly and became Speaker in 1980. He served in that
post for fourteen years, ruling with an iron fist in a velvet glove,
rewarding allies with lucrative patronage posts and punishing opponents. He
called himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly.” In 1996, he was elected
mayor of San Francisco, serving two terms. Along the way, he attracted the
attention of the FBI, which repeatedly investigated him but failed to bring charges.
The FBI may have failed, but Brown had
plenty of critics. “The legacy of Willie Brown has been one of corruption
and incompetence in government, and the [FBI] probes were a reflection of
that,” the head of San Francisco Common Cause told the San Francisco
Chronicle in 2004.
By 2004, Brown was on his term-limited way
out of office, but one of his key allies, Kamala Harris, was on her way up.
Harris was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2003. Brown had put
his formidable political machine behind Harris, swinging a come-from-behind election her
way.
It was not the first time Willie Brown had
given Kamala Harris a helping hand. The two dated in 1994 and 1995. In
1994, Brown appointed the then-obscure county prosecutor to two influential
state commissions—the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the
California Medical Assistance Commission. Harris’s political rise was
launched—elected DA in 2003 and 2007, California Attorney General in 2010
and 2014, United States Senator in 2016, and Vice President in
2020.
Questions persist about what Harris may have
done for Brown and his allies. The investigative journalist Peter Schweizer
noted in a recent interview with Breitbart that in her first DA race, Harris ran against the incumbent
prosecutor, who was investigating corruption allegations against Brown.
“And when she won,” Schweizer said, “she dropped a whole series of
cases” connected to Brown.
The biggest case, Schweizer said, involves
an 800-page document from the diocese of the Catholic Church in San
Francisco detailing accusations of sexual abuse linked to “individuals
and entities” with connections to the Democratic Party. But when
“Kamala Harris came in, not only did she not prosecute anybody involved
in the scandals, she actually refused to release the 800-page document. And
it has been reported in San Francisco, that document disappeared and never
was to be found.”
Those are serious charges that raise serious
questions. What cases were dropped when Kamala Harris became San Francisco
DA? Does she appear in records of FBI investigations of Willie Brown? What
became of the San Francisco diocese investigation? Where is the 800-page
report? Judicial Watch is investigating these issues and other matters
linked to Democratic Party power brokers in California.
As for Willie Brown, now 90, he remains a
strong Harris supporter. In a hastily called sidewalk press conference after President Biden announced he would not run for
re-election, Brown suggested that the president should resign immediately,
stepping aside for Harris.
A Biden resignation would “silence all of
this nonsense about how to select some new nominee,” Brown said. “Her
chances go up if he would at this moment say not only am I no longer the
candidate, I’m no longer the president—she is.”
Until next week,
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