Court Greenlights Judicial Watch Lawsuit to Clean Up Oregon Voter Rolls

Judicial Watch continues to make progress in cleaning up voter rolls across the country.

A federal court in Oregon ruled that our lawsuit filed on behalf of the Constitution Party of Oregon and two registered voters to force the clean-up of Oregon’s voter rolls may proceed.

Our lawsuit alleges that Oregon violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which 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.

In June, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in this lawsuit.

In a June 6 Justice Department press release, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said: “Accurate voter registration rolls are critical to ensure that elections in Oregon are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud…. States have specific obligations under the list maintenance provisions of the NVRA, and the Department of Justice will vigorously enforce those requirements.”

We initially filed the lawsuit in October 2024 to enforce basic voter list maintenance provisions under Section 8 of the NVRA after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of Oregon counties (Judicial Watch, et al. v. The State of Oregon et al. (No. 6:24-cv-01783)).

In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory.

In our complaint, we 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. We assert 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.

Recently, federal courts in California and Illinois separately ruled that our lawsuits may proceed against those states to force them to clean up their voter rolls.

Judicial Watch announced in May that its work led to the removal of more than five million ineligible names from voter rolls nationwide.

We applaud the court’s decision to allow our case to continue in our effort to clean up voter rolls in Oregon. We now have three federal lawsuits against three states to clean potentially millions of names from the voter rolls.

As you know, we are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. Our team of experienced voting rights attorneys stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii and cleaned up voter rolls across the country, among other achievements.

Robert Popper, a 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.

Recently, the Commonwealth of Kentucky reported that 735,000 ineligible voter registrations had been removed from its voter rolls since 2019 by the State Board of Elections as part of its 2018 consent decree settling a lawsuit by Judicial Watch.

As part of its 2022 settlement, New York City alone has removed 918,139 ineligible names from its rolls. Recent data show 477,056 removals between March 2023 and February 2025, which is in addition to the 441,083 previously reported removals.

In July, we filed its opening brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in a case filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors, who are before the court to vindicate their standing to challenge an Illinois law extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law (Rep. Michael J. Bost, Laura Pollastrini, and Susan Sweeney v. The Illinois State Board of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No. 1:22-cv-02754, 23-2644, 24-568)).

More Nashville Shooter Manifesto Documents Released to Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch received another 485 pages from the “manifesto” of the March 27, 2023, shooter, Audrey Hale (also known as Aiden Hale), who was the perpetrator of The Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN.

The records detail the shooter’s violent thoughts, the targeting and planning of the shooting attack on The Covenant School, and transgender-related obsessions.

Police reported that Hale, 28, broke into the elementary school in Nashville, TN, where she had been a student, and shot and killed three students and three adults. In March 2025, Metro Nashville Police Department published its investigative case summary.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released the pages in response to our FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:23-cv-01483)). After multiple releases containing zero records, the FBI finally began producing pages, stating they were no longer subject to law enforcement proceedings. Many names and faces in the photos were redacted, as were entire pages.

These are the writings of a deeply disturbed individual, but there was no point in the Biden FBI hiding them. We appreciate the Trump administration’s transparency. This information may possibly help Americans avoid tragedies like this in the future.

We previously obtained 112 pages of records in April 2025, and an additional 231 pages in June 2025—bringing the total number of pages released through this lawsuit to 828. The full “manifesto” consists of 2,056 pages, and the FBI is continuing to produce additional pages to us.

Our lawsuit also seeks materials provided to the FBI by local law enforcement. The FBI is withholding these documents, claiming they are categorically exempt from disclosure under FOIA. We continue to press for their public release.

In a separate case, in May 2023, we filed an open records lawsuit on behalf of retired Hamilton County Sheriff James Hammond and the Tennessee Firearms Association, Inc. (“TFA”) (Hammond et al. v. Metropolitan Govt of Nashville et al. (No. 23-0538-III)). The court later consolidated our lawsuit with several others related to release of public records from The Covenant School shooting.

Trump Administration Saving Millions in ‘Science’ Grants to DEI Projects

The radicals running the Biden administration were liberally distributing your tax dollars through the National Science Foundation to their pet DEI projects at universities. Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports:

The Trump administration is saving American taxpayers a substantial amount of money by terminating hundreds of “science” grants that fund all sorts of preposterous Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at dozens of universities and a few nonprofits throughout the United States. The cash is disbursed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), established by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science, advance national health, prosperity, and welfare and to secure national defense. Instead, under the Biden administration the agency went on a remarkable DEI spending frenzy that has supported a multitude of exclusionary leftist projects at private and public academic institutions nationwide as well as organizations that claim to advance minority causes.

One of the country’s largest public universities alone has lost tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants identified by the Trump administration as supporting blatant DEI projects that are unlikely to further the agency’s mission. With an undergraduate enrollment of 142,000, Arizona State University (ASU) has received around $28.5 million from the NSF for over two dozen DEI initiatives recently placed on the chopping block. Among them is a $2.4 million project called Black Girls as Creators described as an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education to help black girls focus on intersectionality and racial equity. An “institutional transformational” project that aims to reshape faculty policies for gender equity and intersectionality received nearly $3 million. A program that positioned engineering faculty to support black students through awareness, knowledge, capacity building and community got $733,633 and over half a million dollars went to a community transformation experiment that claims to increase justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic standards.

Public universities on opposite sides of the country are losing a total of $2 million for identical projects titled “Challenging Anti-Black-Racism in Civil and Environmental Engineering Curriculum” that claim to serve the national public interest by establishing education practices that acknowledge low-income communities of color are disproportionately exposed to air and water pollution. The University of South Florida in Tampa received $1.5 million for the environmental justice initiative and the University of California Berkeley $500,000. UC Berkeley also lost a $1.6 million allocation from the NSF to help center scientific and environmental literacy around the voices of communities of color since, according to the grant document, the entire field is “aligned with dominant views that can marginalize, exclude, and erase the knowledge and expertise of communities of color.” The renowned northern California university asserts that its study will “contribute new understandings of how race and culture influence learning, as well as how racism and biases have shaped research to date.”

The list of canceled DEI science grants is extensive with many of the hefty awards—most around a million dollars—using similar language in the name of combatting widespread discrimination in the field. The University of Denver in Colorado got north of a million dollars to mobilize equity and raise inclusivity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) by creating a special coalition that will hire more faculty with “intersectional identities” and increase women as well as other underrepresented groups. The University of Missouri in St. Louis also got over a million dollars to advance equity in STEM academic careers by cultivating a climate where women, African Americans, Hispanics, and other historically underrepresented groups will thrive. The City University of New York (CUNY) received $999,839 to implement institutional transformation emphasizing the advancement of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty. A south Florida public university received $999,853 to focus on inclusive support for gender diversity and intersectional minorities, especially Latina, and African American women in hiring and retention.

Among the nonprofits that saw their government money cut is the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which received nearly $600,000 to address accessibility and inclusion issues at visitor-serving organizations such as museums, botanical gardens, and zoos that “tend to serve disproportionately white, able-bodied, and high-income audiences.” A Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) in New York, got over $3 million from the government to better engage underserved families in STEM by targeting low-income Latinx (a gender-neutral term fabricated by the left) families with media and text-based mechanisms. The stated goal is to build knowledge about how innovative, culturally responsive tools can help Latinx and low-income families engage in fun STEM learning at home. These are just some examples from a drawn-out list documenting the waste of over a billion dollars spent by the previous administration to appease the left. The complete list of cancelled NSF grants can be viewed here.

Until next week,