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.”
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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