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In mid-April 2018, a months-old claim that the U.S. had 3.5 million more registered voters than live adults reappeared on social media. That claim appears to have originated with a National Review article of 11 August 2017 that built on information compiled by Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project: Even if these numbers are assumed to be accurate, presenting them as definitively demonstrating that some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America’s adult citizens is a questionable and problematic claim, given that the information was compiled from only 462 counties in 38 states, yet the entire U.S. comprises over 3,000 counties in fifty states. Many of those other counties might well have substantially fewer registered voters on their rolls than adult residents who are eligible to vote. Another major issue with such a claim is the potential inclusion of inactive voters among the tallies of registered voters, a matter that was publicized in a 1 August 2017 letter Judicial Watch sent to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla threatening to sue unless the state and eleven of its counties produced voter records to them. According to Judicial Watch, their own analysis of U.S. Census data and voter registration records indicated those eleven counties included numbers of registered voters exceeding the numbers of adults eligible to vote in those counties. In December 2017, Judicial Watch made good on their threat, initiating litigation that is currently in progress in U.S. District Court, Central District of California. The lawsuit accuses California and multiple jurisdictions of violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) by failing to maintain updated voter registration rolls. Stories based on Judicial Watch's letter initially made Internet waves in late summer 2017 via right-leaning blogs and Kremlin propaganda networks. In April 2018, another version of the claim went viral in the form of an editorial published months ago by the financial publication Investors Business Daily: Many articles used that information to imply widespread voter fraud was taking place, an unfounded claim regularly invoked by President Donald Trump. However, as multiple news organizations have already pointed out, the accusation of voter registration irregularities in California rests on the manner in which Judicial Watch counted California voters, combining active and inactive voters on a county-by-county basis: The consideration of inactive voters is a key issue here. Judicial Watch maintains that registrations listed on state rolls as inactive are vulnerable to abuse by voters who plan to fraudulently double-vote in two different jurisdictions on the same election day, or by third parties because a voter who has moved to a different state is unlikely to monitor the use of or communications concerning an old registration. However, California's National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) regulations state that although inactive voters remain on the rolls as registered voters who are eligible to vote, they do not receive mailed election materials (including mail-in ballots) and must confirm residency at the polling place in person in order to vote — standards that would severely limit or eliminate double-voting or the ability of third parties to fraudulently use inactive registrations to cast ballots: The California Secretary of State's office confirmed to us directly that the only way for inactive voters to obtain a ballot is for them to request a ballot in person at either a county elections office or at a polling location. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told us efforts such as the one undertaken by Judicial Watch and a similar one undertaken by another non-profit, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), are not meant to strengthen election systems but rather to bully election officials into purging voter rolls, in contrast to both the spirit and letter of federal election laws. Often, she said, such figures produced by the likes of Judicial Watch and PILF fail to account for things such as active military members or students attending university away from their home jurisdictions that may affect figures and numbers in different ways: Clarke added that U.S. census data is not a reliable measure of eligible voting population, and thatinactive voters can only be removed from rolls under specific circumstances, as noted in a memo sent from her organization to the 248 jurisdictions targeted by PILF: When all of California (rather than eleven select counties) is taken into account, the figures offered in a 2 January 2018 report issued by the Secretary of State's office list more than 25 million adults eligible to vote residing in California, but fewer than 19 million registered voters. The state would have to encompass more than 6 million ghost voters on its rolls for the number of registered voters to exceed the number of eligible adults. Moreover, in the 2016 presidential election, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the state of California by more than 3.4 million votes over her closest competitor, Republican Donald Trump. Virtually every single one of the claimed 3.5 million ghost voters in the entire U.S. would have had to come to California and cast fraudulent votes in order to be responsible for that outcome. The trope that upwards of 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election is so persistent that it resulted in a now-defunct voter fraud commission, which was quietly disbanded in January 2018 without presenting any evidence of widespread voter fraud.
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