Judicial Watch to Monitor Wisconsin Polls, Sets
Up Election Fraud Report Hot Line
With the election less than two weeks away, Judicial Watch is preparing to
monitor Wisconsin polls and is setting up a National Election Fraud Report
Line for voters to report voting issues as part of our ongoing election
integrity efforts. Our 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.
We monitor 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.
Our lead election law attorney, Robert Popper, established Judicial
Watch’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.
The 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].
Our Judicial Watch election teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to
expose and deter any fraud, and our Election Hotline will expand our
watchdog capability right down to the grass roots.
As you are probably aware, Judicial Watch is 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, 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.
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)).
In September, we argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit regarding a lower court ruling on Mississippi’s election
law that permits absentee ballots to be received as late as five business
days after Election Day.
In a similar lawsuit, in 2022, on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two
other registered voters, we sued Illinois for allowing vote-by-mail ballots
(even those without postmarks) to be counted if received up to 14 calendar
days after Election Day if the ballots are dated on or before Election
Day.
We filed our latest California lawsuit in May 2024 after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls
in dozens of California counties. We sued California under the NVRA to force it 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.
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 we 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.)
In March 2024, on behalf of Breakthrough Ideas, Illinois Family Action, and
Carol J. Davis, we sued Illinois officials under the NVRA to force
them to clean the State’s voter rolls.
In December 2023, our attorneys sent a notice
letter to election officials in the District of Columbia notifying them
of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove
inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letter pointed out that
D.C. publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations
under a key provision of the NVRA. The letter threatened a federal lawsuit
unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion. 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 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. According to
a national
study conducted by Judicial Watch 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 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, 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 Judicial Watch with the most recent
voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
We also 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
Judicial Watch lawsuits.
In December 2023, our lawyers 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 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 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, 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.
Also 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 us with the most
recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
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 Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state
legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
And, even after all this work, more is coming – as Judicial Watch
increases its work to ensure free, fair, and honest elections!
Judicial Watch Sues to Force Clean Up of Oregon Voter Rolls—Lawsuit
Alleges the State Has One of Worst Voting Lists in the Nation
Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections. Oregon has one of the dirtiest
voting rolls in America and needs to clean them up ASAP! That’s why
adding to our accomplishments listed above we filed our latest National
Voter Registration Act (NVRA) lawsuit against the State of Oregon this week
after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls
in dozens of Oregon counties.
In July 2024, our attorneys 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.
When Oregon claimed it was too expensive to comply with the mandates of the
NVRA, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Constitution Party of Oregon and
two lawfully registered voters of Umatilla County and Marion County,
Oregon, against Lavonne Griffin-Valade in her official capacity as Oregon
Secretary of State and the State of Oregon, to make “a reasonable effort
to remove” the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter
rolls as required by federal law (Judicial Watch, et al. v. The State of Oregon et
al. (No. 6:24-cv-01783)). The suit was filed to enforce basic
voter list maintenance provisions under Section 8 of the National Voter
Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
In our complaint, our lawyers argue that Oregon’s voter rolls contain
large numbers of old, inactive registrations; and that 29 of Oregon’s 36
counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election
law. Our complaint asserts that Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall
registration rates exceeding 100%; and that Oregon has the highest known
inactive registration rate of any state in the nation. In combination, all
of these facts show that Oregon is failing to remove inactive registrations
pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA. The suit was filed in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Oregon, Eugene Division, to
compel the defendants to comply with their voter list maintenance
obligations under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993
(NVRA).
We are being assisted in our Oregon lawsuit by Stephen Joncus of Joncus Law
PC in Happy Valley, Oregon.
Let’s hope Oregon does what it is supposed to do under law and start
cleaning up its voting rolls!
Judicial Watch Sues for Records of Social Media Posts Critical of Donald
Trump by Top FBI Agent Investigating Trump Assassination Attempt
When we discovered top FBI
officials allegedly ordered an agent to scrub his Facebook page to delete
anti-Trump vitriol before they would promote him to head the bureau’s
Miami field office, we launched a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
with the Justice Department to get to the bottom of this untoward effort to
sanitize the bias of agents within the Bureau. The Biden-Harris FBI is
engaged in a cover-up of a cover-up of one its top agent’s anti-Trump
bias. This is why many Americans are concerned about the FBI’s dangerous
political bias against Trump – and whether the FBI can be trusted to
investigate the attempts on his life.
We filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for
messages among top leaders of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
referencing social media posts of Special Agent Jeffrey
Veltri, head of the Miami Field Office, which is investigating the
September 15 assassination attempt against Donald Trump (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02740)).
We sued after the Department of Justice refused to respond in full to a
November 21, 2023, FOIA request for:
1. All emails and Lync system messages sent to and from the following
2. FBI officials referencing social media
posts and/or Facebook posts generated by Miami Field Office Special Agent
Jeffrey Veltri: Director Christopher Wray, Deputy Director Paul Abbate,
and/or Executive Assistant Director Jennifer Moore.
3. All communications, whether by email,
text message, or the FBI Lync system between Director Wray, Dep. Director
Abbate and/or EAD Jennifer Moore on the one hand and Miami FO Special Agent
Veltri related to Donald Trump, social media posts, Facebook and/or
political opinions.
Veltri was reportedly “one of several officials that used
litmus tests to ‘purge’ political conservatives” like whistleblower Marcus Allen from the FBI.
We have frequently sued the FBI when it refused to release requested
documents.
In June 2024 we released documents showing that the FBI Office of
Congressional Affairs provided a Democrat staffer with information on FBI
whistleblowers who detailed the bureau’s targeting of political opponents
and retaliation for their testifying at a May 18, 2023, hearing of the
House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
Government.
We also represented Marcus Allen, a decorated veteran, FBI analyst and witness before the Weaponization Subcommittee,
in a
lawsuit against FBI Director Christopher Wray for violating
Allen’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of holding
“conspiratorial views,” stripping his security clearance, and
suspending him from duty without pay. On May 31, 2024, Allen’s security
clearance was reinstated.
In January 2024, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense for
reports submitted by a military officer to his superiors regarding an
alleged conversation around January 2017 between CIA analysts Eric
Ciaramella and Sean Misko about trying to “get rid” of then-President
Trump.
In November 2023, we released FBI records showing top officials rushing
to craft a public response to the leaked FBI intelligence memo that
revealed its targeting of Catholics who adhere to traditional beliefs on
church issues.
In June 2023, we sued for all FBI communications from bureau
officials using several systems and databases regarding investigations
carried out after an October 4, 2021, memo from Attorney General Merrick
Garland instructing investigators to target American parents due to an
alleged “increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence
against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public
schools” In a March 21, 2023, report on the Garland memo, the Subcommittee on
the Weaponization of the Federal Government cited FBI data which states
that 25 inquiries under the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” had been opened
since the bureau began tracking the alleged incidents.
In September 2022, we filed a FOIA lawsuit for all records in the possession of FBI
Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten regarding an August 6, 2020,
briefing provided to members of the U.S. Senate. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and
Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that raised concerns that the briefing was intended
to undermine the senators’ investigation of Hunter Biden.
In May 2022, we announced a federal court ordered the FBI to disclose
additional details about FBI and other officials “cc-ed” on the memo
used to justify launching the “Crossfire Hurricane” spy operation
against President Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. Judge
Carl J. Nichols had given the FBI until June 16, 2022, to respond. The
order came in a September 2019 FOIA lawsuit our lawyers filed after the FBI failed to
respond to a request for the memo, known as an “Electronic
Communication” or “EC.”
In August 2020, we released 323
pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and
former FBI attorney Lisa Page. The records include an email from Strzok to
other FBI officials about Trump’s tweets regarding them spying on him, as
well as their interaction with other media outlets including CNN.
In December 2019,we sued the Justice Department and CIA for
communications between Ciaramella and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former
FBI Attorney Lisa Page, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and/or
the Special Counsel’s Office. In both cases the government refused to
produce records, “refusing to confirm or deny the existence or
non-existence of responsive records” because “confirming or denying the
existence or non-existence of responsive records would reveal information
protected by the CIA Act, namely the existence or non-existence of an
employment relationship between the Agency and Mr. Ciaramella.” And, the
government claimed, it would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy.”
The FBI, despite being a storied law enforcement agency, has an awful
record of corruption and cover-up. Judicial Watch’s litigation to hold
the FBI accountable under the law is – quite simply – essential!
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Kamala Harris Secret Service
Motorcade Accident
The Biden-Harris Secret Service is in a dangerous tailspin and literally
can’t drive straight. And rather than be forthcoming about these issues
with the American people, the Secret Service is engaged is a series of
mounting and unlawful cover-ups, going back at least to a 2022 car accident
by Kamala Harris’ Secret Service driver, which the agency initially –
and falsely – dismissed as “mechanical failure.”
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security for records on a 2022 car accident involving Vice President Kamala
Harris’s Secret Service motorcade (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland
Security (No. 1:24-cv-02752)).
The suit was filed after the agency failed to respond to a July 19, 2024,
our FOIA request for:
1. Any and all emails and text messages sent to and from members of the
Vice-Presidential Protection Division regarding the October 3, 2022,
accident involving the vehicle carrying Vice President Kamala Harris and/or
the driving skills/abilities of the agent driving the vehicle at the time
of the accident.
2. All waivers for defensive driver classes
granted to USSS special agents involved in vehicular accidents with
official vehicles.
3. Records reflecting directives for USSS
special agents to undergo defensive driver classes as a result of being
involved in accidents with official vehicles.
The New York Post reported in October 2022 that “Vice President
Kamala Harris was involved in a minor car accident Monday, one that was
initially — and falsely — dismissed as ‘mechanical failure.’” The
driver of her SUV struck a curb hard enough “that the tire needed to be
replaced, bringing the VP’s motorcade to a standstill.” NBC reported that the vehicle had been partially
airborne.
In my new book, Rights
and Freedoms in Peril, I detail some of Judicial Watch’s numerous
lawsuits and disclosures about Secret Service controversies.
In addition, on September 3, 2024, following up on reports that the Biden
Secret Service denied President Trump’s requests for additional Secret
Service protection, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security for all Secret Service and other records regarding potential
increased protective services to former President Trump’s security detail
prior to the attempt on his life at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler,
Pennsylvania (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland
Security (No. 1:24-cv-02495)).
On August 23, we received USSS records that show the Secret Service has made it a
top priority that “diversity and inclusion is not just ‘talked about’
– but demonstrated by all employees through ‘Every Action, Every
Day.’” [Emphasis in original] The records show the Secret Service,
demands that 12 percent of its workforce be composed of “persons with
disabilities,” and that it is the policy of the Secret Service to
provide equal employment opportunity without regard to such non-merit
factors as “disability (physical or mental).”
Until next week,
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