Election Integrity Watchdog Puts States on Notice to Clean Up Voter Rolls

In the wake of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) announcement Tuesday that over one million ineligible voters had been removed from the state’s voter registration rolls, an election integrity watchdog organization is leading a campaign to pressure states across the nation to do likewise as the November election approaches.

Abbott’s statement noted that election reform laws recently enacted in Texas have led to “the removal of over one million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state.” The removals included 7,000 illegally registered noncitizens and 6,000 convicted felons. The expulsions also included 463,000 individuals on Texas’s “suspense list” — those who “don’t respond to requested certification forms.”

With the November election 10 weeks away, J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is hoping that every state in the nation will follow Texas’s lead — and if they don’t, his organization may be summoning them to court.

“[W]hat if these one million ineligible voters were not removed from the voter rolls in Texas?” he wondered during Wednesday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “I will tell you that that would be called Michigan. … [W]e’ve been in litigation against Michigan because Secretary [of State] Jocelyn Benson won’t remove at least 2[7],000 dead voters from the voter rolls. … We’re now in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals against her. … [That] 27,000 [number] was only looking at people over the age of 70. So if you died at the age of 40 or 50 or 55 or 60, even in Michigan, we wouldn’t have necessarily made that part of our lawsuit. So it’s clearly more than 27,000.”

Adams, who serves as the president of PILF, commended Texas for its election integrity efforts. “Texas has been one of the leaders in making sure that the elections are clean. For example, they have a law there that if you just go out and register voters, you have to get training, you have to get deputized, and you can’t engage in bad conduct. And of course, the Left challenged this law in court, and it was upheld.”

In response to a common talking point put forward by Democratic lawmakers and left-wing activists that election integrity efforts amount to “voter suppression,” Adams was unequivocal.

“I always like to point out that ‘suppression’ is a fake word — it’s not in any federal law,” he observed. “It’s a made-up word by the Left … to attempt to blend the legal with the illegal. So if you have voter ID [laws], it’s ‘voter suppression.’ If you clean voter rolls, it’s ‘voter suppression.’ And it sounds very nefarious, [but] it doesn’t exist in the law. What does exist is intimidation, coercion, and threats. There’s no such thing as voter suppression. … [S]tates that are cleaning their voter rolls are following federal law. States have an obligation to follow federal law and have a reasonable maintenance program that removes the dead and people who moved away. And kudos to [states like] Texas, Florida, [and] Ohio that have good laws in place and good practices to make our elections secure.”

Adams went on to highlight Nevada as a particularly worrisome example of a state that has put in place a vast, unmonitored mail-in voting operation.

“It breaks my heart to see how bad things have gotten in Nevada, because you have automatic mail voting … where everybody on the voter rolls, even if they don’t ask, gets a ballot mailed to them at their last known address, and those ballots are going out by the hundreds of thousands without request. And what we have found is that Nevada has lots of commercial addresses where those ballots are going improperly — strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, liquor stores. A Sonic drive-in in Las Vegas had a purported registered voter. We visited these places. … And what we did is we sued Clark County and also Washoe County, which is Reno. But Clark thankfully took steps to fix this problem.”

Adams further underscored the gravity of the problem of ballots being mailed out en masse to the last known mailing addresses of individuals.

“When you have automatic mail voting … in a swing state like Nevada, where every single registered voter gets a ballot mailed, even if they don’t ask, even if they’re not alive anymore … that changes the course of a lot of elections, in my view. You had a U.S. Senate race with Adam Laxalt [that] was decided by only 7,000 votes. In that same race, we knew that 95,000 ballots went unaccounted for. We don’t know what happened to them. Garbage cans, dumpsters, whatever. And so it’s just the wrong way to be picking leaders by automatically mailing ballots to every single person on the list.”

Adams highlighted that PILF is taking legal action against states that are not fulfilling their election obligations proscribed by law, from “Maine to New Mexico to California and every place in between, it seems. I think we have 19 active lawsuits right now.”

Adams concluded by expressing hope that that the 2024 election will be carried out more lawfully than what occurred in the 2020 election, which was mired in irregularities and uncertainty over the integrity of the results.

“This is going to be better than 2020,” he predicted. “The Left has not obliterated all kinds of state laws everywhere like they did with COVID in 2020. There’s a lot more eyes on the game. This is going to be a much better process than it was four years ago, I can promise you that. So don’t think your vote is not going to count.”