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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.
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,
but let 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 …
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