When CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta challenged President Trump's concern about vote fraud at a White House briefing this week, the president cited a Judicial Watch lawsuit against Los Angeles County after 1.6 million ineligible voters were discovered on its roll.
On Thursday, Judicial Watch announced a new lawsuit, in North Carolina, where many of the state's 100 counties have a large number of ineligible voters on their rolls.
In the complaint, Judicial Watch argues the states' own data shows a total of 1 million inactive voters on its rolls.
The suit targets the counties of Mecklenburg and Guilford for allegedly failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters, as required by the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the NVRA.
The lawsuit also claims the counties violated the NVRA by failing to make available to Judicial Watch public records concerning efforts to comply with the law.
The law requires the removal of the names of registrants who have failed to respond to an address confirmation notice and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections.
Judicial Watch noted that in June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission released data showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of North Carolina’s 100 counties are near, at or above 100% of their age-eligible citizenry.
Courts consider that to be a strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps required by law to remove ineligible registrants.
Judicial Watch said its analysis also showed that at the time of the EAC report, the entire state had a registration rate close to 100% of its age-eligible citizenry.
A large proportion of registrations have shown no voting activity for more than five years.
"Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, and Judicial Watch must insist that North Carolina follows federal law to clean up its voting rolls," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
"We want cleaner elections, as the law requires, and we expect this lawsuit will cause North Carolina to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls the names of voters who have moved away or died," he said.
Last December, Judicial Watch provided notice to 19 large counties in five states that it intended to sue unless they take steps to comply with the NVRA.
Letters have been sent to counties in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado.
In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio.
California settled an NVRA lawsuit with Judicial Watch and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls.
Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
Judicial Watch said that despite the effort, voter registration lists across the country remain significantly out of date.
Judicial Watch’s 2019 study found 378 counties nationwide that had more voter registrations than citizens old enough to vote
The 378 counties combined had about 2.5 million registrations over the 100% registered mark.
That's a drop of about 1 million from Judicial Watch's previous analysis of voter registration data in 2017.
'A terrible thing'
At the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing Tuesday, Trump called the kind of universal mail-in voting system proposed by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, "a terrible thing" because of its vulnerability to vote fraud.
The president said "there's a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting, mail-in ballots."
At Wednesday's briefing, CNN's Acosta asked for evidence of vote fraud in mail-in balloting, which is conducted in several states.
Trump pointed to a Judicial Watch settlement with Los Angeles County requiring the county to remove as many as 1.6 million inactive registrations.
"Thousands of votes are gathered and dumped in a location and all of a sudden you lose elections that you think you win," Trump said.
"I'm not going to stand for it."
Trump said the country should have voter ID.
"If you send [in a ballot], you should be sure that that vote is meaningful," he said.