Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., is threatening to sue 11 states with counties that have more registered than eligible voters.
The group announced Tuesday it has sent notice-of-violation letters to 11 states that combined have more than 100 counties where the number of registered voters surpasses the number of citizens of voting age. States that received the letters were Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Judicial Watch requested that the states "conduct or implement a systematic, uniform, nondiscriminatory program to remove from the list of eligible voters the names of persons who have become ineligible to vote by reason of a change of residence, death or a disqualifying criminal conviction." States also were asked to remove from voter registration lists "noncitizens who have registered to vote unlawfully."
The group warned in the letters that if the counties do not make a reasonable effort to clean their rolls as required by Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, it would file federal lawsuits against the states.
"Dirty election rolls can mean dirty elections," Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch's president, said in a statement. "These 11 states face possible Judicial Watch lawsuits unless they follow the law and take reasonable steps to clean up their voting rolls of dead, moved, and non-citizen voters."
In 2015, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), an Indiana-based legal group that litigates to protect election integrity, discovered 141 counties across the United States that have more registered than eligible voters. The group warning those counties about their voter rolls.
PILF filed lawsuits in a number of counties. The group also has fought lawsuits against voter identification laws brought by Marc Elias, the former top lawyer to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Those lawsuits began roughly a year and half before the 2016 elections. They were fueled by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros.
Demos, a Soros-funded progressive advocacy group chaired by Elizabeth Warren's daughter, is intervening legally in counties PILF is suing due to poorly maintained voter rolls.