A state synonymous with voter fraud is now the target of a lawsuit aimed at forcing officials to clean up its voter rolls.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch has filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois' voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” the group announced.
“Illinois' voting rolls are a mess. Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Illinois should take immediate steps to clean its rolls to both prevent fraud and increase voter confidence in the elections.”
The lawsuit requests the court require Illinois to “develop and implement a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls.”
Illinois has been the subject of long-running jokes about rampant voter fraud due to its long-standing ties to organized crime and union bosses, and suspected mass fraud in the state's 1960 presidential election between Republican Richard Nixon and declared winner Democrat John F. Kennedy, whose father has reputed ties to the state's organized crime syndicates.
“The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of Judicial Watch and the nonprofit organizations Illinois Family Action and Breakthrough Ideas, and Carol J. Davis, who is a lawfully registered voter in Illinois,” Judicial Watch reports.
In a statement announcing the suit Judical Watch reports how officials have not maintained clean voter rolls:
The NVRA 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. 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)). In July 2023, Judicial Watch successfully sued Illinois for failing to provide access voting list data to a citizens group as federal law requires.
Judicial Watch points out in its current lawsuit that 23 Illinois counties, with a combined registration list of 980,089 voters, reported removing a combined total of only 100 registrations in the last two-year reporting period under a crucial provision of the NVRA. The lawsuit alleges that this is an “absurdly small” number, and contends that there “is no possible way these counties can be conducting a general program that makes reasonable effort to cancel registrations of voters who have become ineligible because of a change of residence while removing so few registrations.”
Judicial Watch further points out:
Illinois' own reported data show that more than one fifth of its counties removed few or no registrations under a crucial NVRA provision concerning voters who have moved.
Illinois informed the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that 34 counties simply failed to report any data about removals under that key NVRA provision.
Nineteen of these counties also failed to report any data regarding registrations removed because of the death of the voter.
Dozens of other counties failed to report other kinds of important NVRA data to the EAC.
“Judicial Watch notes that counties typically do not ignore their reporting obligations to the EAC where the data is favorable to them. Rather, this failure suggests non-compliance with the NVRA. In all, 66 of Illinois' 108 jurisdictions – or 60% of them – either reported fewer unusually low NVRA removals or failed to report a crucial data category to the EAC. These jurisdictions contain a total of 5.8 million registered voters, or about two thirds of Illinois' 8.8 million registered voters,” the group reports.
According to Judicial Watch data “suggests that 15 Illinois jurisdictions have more voter registrations than citizens of voting age.”
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