A public interest law firm has threatened to bring lawsuits against more than 30 counties across the United States that have either more registered voters than eligible citizens, or a number of registrants that is implausibly high, the second such wave of notice letters sent by the group to various counties.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group based in Indiana, sent the statutory notice letters on Jan. 19 to election officials spanning 37 counties in six different states. The group says that by failing to purge names from the rolls, the counties are failing to comply with the National Voter Registration Act.
"Voter rolls across America contain substantial numbers of ineligible voters, resulting in the possible disenfranchisement of legally eligible voters via ballot dilution that threatens to taint the integrity of the election process," the notice letters says.
"Based on our comparison of publicly available information published by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Election Assistance Commission, your county is failing to comply with Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)," it continues. "Federal law requires election officials to conduct a reasonable effort to maintain voter registration lists free of dead voters, ineligible voters and voters that have moved away."
"In short, your county has an implausible number of registered voters compared to the number of eligible living citizens."
According to the foundation, five counties in Colorado, seven in Florida, two in Nevada, 12 in North Carolina, six in Pennsylvania, and five in Virginia show a substantially high number of registrants and will receive the warning from the group.
The foundation has also asked officials located in Wisconsin and New Hampshire to provide information about their efforts to detect non-citizens and their current efforts to prevent aliens from voting in elections.
"Corrupted voter rolls provide the perfect environment for voter fraud," said J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the foundation. "Non-citizens have participated in American elections and instead of prosecuting the behavior the Department of Justice has enabled it in places like Florida. Too much is at stake this year to allow that to happen again."
The foundation says it will monitor responses from the 37 counties and hopes to engage election officials in discussions on how to clean their voter rolls to ensure aliens are not registered.
This is the second such time the law group has sent statutory letters to counties throughout the United States they deemed had suspicious voter rolls.
The foundation sent notice letters in August to 141 counties across 21 states, including counties in Michigan (24 counties), Kentucky (18), Illinois (17), Indiana (11), Alabama (10), Colorado (10), Texas (9), Nebraska (7), New Mexico (5), South Dakota (5), Kansas (4), Mississippi (4), Louisiana (3), West Virginia (3), Georgia (2), Iowa (2), Montana (2), and North Carolina (2), as well as Arizona, Missouri, and New York (1 each).
The foundation discovered that some counties showed voter registration rates that exceed 150 percent during its first investigation into voter rolls.
The foundation has since filed litigation against two of the counties that received the letters in August.
The first lawsuit was brought against Clarke County, Mississippi, which led to a consent decree that will force election officials to remove ineligible voters before the 2016 elections take place. The second, against Noxubee County, Mississippi, is still pending.