California Begins Process to Remove 1.5 Million Inactive Voters From its Rolls
Perhaps this is an excellent start to revive Republican chances in the Golden State?
Last week, Los Angeles County officially sent notices to 1.5 million inactive voters on its voter rolls, which is the first step in removing the names of voters who have moved, died, or are otherwise ineligible to vote in federal, state, and local elections.
Under the terms of the settlement, voters who do not respond in the next two federal elections must be removed from county registration lists.
In addition, California’s top election official has put all 58 of its counties on notice that they must also purge inactive voters from their rosters. The updated California National Voter Registration Act Manual, published in March 2019, lays out the federal maintenance requirements for county voter rolls.
To drive that message home, the California Secretary of State’s office delivered a training presentation to election officials in every county regarding the federal list-maintenance requirements.
There were an estimated 5 million inactive registrations in the state as of November 2016, the latest figures available, according to a Judicial Watch analysis of data published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Under the terms of the settlement reached, officials will remove registered voters who do not respond to the notices and who do not vote in the next two federal elections. So, the removal will begin no sooner than 2022.
[California Secretary of State Alex] Padilla also agreed to update the state’s online NVRA manual in order to make clear that ineligible names must be removed and to notify each California county that they are obliged to do this. On April 11, Secretary Padilla notified Judicial Watch that this part of the settlement agreement had been implemented.
The agreement also required the office of the secretary of state to send a written advisory to all county clerks/registrars of voters in California stating that current federal law requires the cancellation of a registrant who has failed to respond to an official notice and who then fails to vote, offers to vote, correct the registrar’s record, “or otherwise have their eligibility to vote confirmed for a period of time including the next two general federal elections.”
…Judicial Watch discovered that California had treated the removal of inactive voters as permissive, not mandatory, and had not cleaned its voter registration rolls in at least 20 years. The Supreme Court affirmed last year in an opinion affirming a historic Judicial Watch settlement with Ohio that the NVRA “makes this removal mandatory.”
“This Judicial Watch settlement will result in the immediate and ongoing clean-up of voter rolls in California and LA County,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This victory for clean elections in California will set another national precedent for other states to take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.”
Interestingly, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently said the Republican Party has started its path into the “waste bin of history.”
Newsom says Republican Party is headed “into the waste bin of history”https://t.co/wl5Fc2axcw pic.twitter.com/m1bEBHn5sq
— The Hill (@thehill) June 17, 2019
Speaking to POLITICO in his office at the state Capitol, California’s new governor uses superlatives like “magnificent” to describe his achievements in his first six months, basks in the bliss (for now) of leading a Democratic super-majority in Sacramento and wastes no opportunity to score points on the national stage.
“America in 2019 is California in the 1990s,” Newsom says, not approvingly. “The xenophobia, the nativism, the fear of ‘the other.’ Scapegoating. Talking down or past people. The hysteria. And so, we’re not going to put up with that. We are going to push back.”
Granted, the California Republican Party is less than robust. Perhaps a purging of inactive voters from the rolls will be a good start for reviving it.
I hope so, as California is currently headed for a typhus-infused, syringe-filled waste bin fast!
[Featured image via YouTube]
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Comments
Sounds unconstitutional to me. WHy should an American be denied to right to vote just because they are deceased.
By that same rationale, democrat voters should be voting early and voting often (dead or alive.)
They do, they do.
Removing ineligible voters certainly sounds like voter suppression to me. Deceased, imaginary, and illegal alien voters are three of the Democrats’ core constituencies.
So CA has become Chicago?
Their votes still count. It’s just that someone else is casting it for them. Racism!!!
Mary what are the CA citizens planning to do to oversee that the Democrat controlled governments (from townships to counties to state house) are following the law?
All 1.5 million mailings are to an address shared by the Democrat Party of California?
Dems most certainly have them all already…….
To quote Rebecca :Newt” Jorden … “It won’t make any difference.” …
Seems like they’ll most likely be removing Republican voters. The dead voters would have been voting democrat all this time, so they don’t count as “inactive”. But living Republicans? They don’t really have a reason to vote so they will be inactive.
what silly fantasies! It will make NO DIFFERENCE. This is proper maintenance, not like the Reep conspiracy over the last 20-30 years to disenfranchise anyone who might be brown, gay, left, black, suspect, atheist, etc etc.
Wanna bet that the overwhelming bulk of inactive voters the state removes are Republicans – and not necessarily inactive?
For those who may not remember, this is how the debacle with the Bush / Gore 2000 election started – a judge ordered the state voter rolls cleaned up.
Until the California Republicans figure out how to deal with ballot harvesting, this will won’t make a dent.
Short of having the Federal courts and Justice Department monitoring voting in the Peoples Democratic Republic of California in the same way they monitored the Jim Crow South, nothing will improve.
How to “deal” with ballot harvesting? If you’re talking about honest ballot harvesting the only way to “deal” with it is to do it themselves. What happened last year is that the Dems did it and the Reps didn’t bother; why would you expect any result but what we saw?
Now if you’re talking about dishonest “harvesting”, i.e. using the legality of harvesting to cover up fraud, then of course the Reps should not do the same, but it falls under the general category of how to deal with fraud, which they really don’t have a handle on. But really there isn’t any evidence that the Dems are doing this; it’s more that since they are Dems it’s a good bet that if there’s an opportunity for fraud they’ll take it, and harvesting presents too good an opportunity for them to waste, so they must be doing it. But that’s not evidence, it’s (justified) ad hominem.
I am not sure ballot harvesting can be considered “honest” or “dishonest”. Instead, ballot harvesting is a system in which cheating is relatively easy, and caching someone who is cheating is difficult if not impossible. In other words – hopelessly corrupt beyond any ability to repair. The fact that it is legal does not make it any less sleazy.
I worked in a number of city and school board elections, in the days of printed ballots. One (of many) rules we were required to follow was to keep the ballots themselves secure – by storing them in a safe place before they were used, or placing them in a locked ballot box after the voter was done voting. In fact, the voter had to put their completed ballot in the ballot box themselves – poll workers were not allowed to touch them until the election was over. We took the locked ballot boxes to a central location to be opened there – and no where else. If any election worker took the ballots outside of the designated voting place they were in legal hot water, even if they had done nothing to them.
Ballot harvesting turn the entire state in to the polling place where ballot security is a joke. And one of the checks that a candidate or party can put on voting fraud is to have poll watchers making sure nothing illegal is going on. Who watches the ballot harvesters?
Ballot harvesting is a system DESIGNED to allow for cheating.
By “honest harvesting” I mean that you collect your own supporters’ ballots and tell your opponents’ supporters that you’re not interested in collecting their ballots, and they need to mail them themselves or find someone else to collect them. That is legal, honest, and above board.
By dishonest harvesting I mean collecting everyone’s ballots, and then throwing away those that you suspect are not from your supporters. That is illegal, but as you say it’s almost impossible to get caught.
The video that circulated a while back, of a ballot harvester visiting the home of a known supporter but getting her mother instead, demonstrates how harvesting is done honestly. The volunteer asked whether the household members intended to vote Democrat, and when the mother said no she declined to take their ballots. She said that was what she’d been trained to do, and it’s exactly right. I’m not aware of any evidence that other Democrat ballot harvesters were doing it differently, i.e. taking such ballots and destroying them, but since it is the Dems I suspect it.
This is a joke. “Under the terms of the settlement, voters who do not respond in the next two federal elections must be removed from county registration lists.” This is how the Left rolls. Delay, delay, delay. Does anyone really believe that between now and the “next two federal elections” that this will be a vague memory? How much more damage can the Left do in California over the next 6 years? A lot.
Voter rolls ought to be completely flushed after each presidential election. Registering is a simple process.
In person, with REAL ID compliant documentation.
With same-day registration, bussing votes to multiple polls voting for the dead and the no-shows. I’m sure the left doesn’t even see this as a speed bump.
Busing. Bussing is something completely different.
I don’t see how this could help Republicans. Inactive voters are, by definition, inactive, i.e. nobody has voted in their names in a while. Therefore they are not being used by the Democratic fraud machine. So why would the Democrats object to removing them? The names they’re using are active — probably more active than when the person was voting in person, if there ever was such a time — and so are not in danger of removal.
If this could actually help the Republicans there’s no way the Democrat administrations in CA would have agreed to do it.
How about the rest of Kalifornicate? Will they be purging their voter rolls of all the dead and illegal voters?