(Washington, DC) – February 23, 2023
Judicial Watch announced today that Los Angeles County removed 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017 (Judicial Watch, Inc., et al. v. Dean C. Logan, et al. (No. 2:17-cv-08948)). Judicial Watch sued on its own behalf and on behalf of four lawfully registered voters in Los Angeles County and the Election Integrity Project California, Inc., a public interest group involved in monitoring California’s voter rolls.
Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Los Angeles County sent almost 1.6 million address confirmation notices in 2019 to voters listed as “inactive” on its voter rolls. Under the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), voters who do not respond to the notices and who do not vote in the following two federal elections must be removed from the voter rolls. The settlement also required an update to the state’s online NVRA manual to make it clear that ineligible names must be removed and to notify each California county that they are obliged to do this.
In the most recent of a series of progress reports to Judicial Watch, Los Angeles County confirmed that a total of 1,207,613 ineligible and inactive voters were recently removed from the rolls. Los Angeles County confirmed last year that over 634,000 of its inactive voters hadn’t voted in at least 10 years.
Judicial Watch previously detailed that Los Angeles County had allowed more than 20% of its registered voters to become inactive without removing them from the voter list.
“This long overdue voter roll clean-up of 1.2 million registrations in Los Angeles County is a historic victory and means California elections are less at risk for fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Building on this success, Judicial Watch will continue its lawsuits and activism to clean up voter rolls and to promote and protect cleaner elections.”
Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.
Judicial Watch recently settled federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In February 2022, Judicial Watch settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional gerrymander.
In May 2022, Judicial Watch sued Illinois on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered Illinois voters to stop state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.
Robert Popper, Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
