Election law is simple. But many don’t want to follow it for reasons we can all guess. The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence.
Among other things, the NVRA requires registrations to be canceled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., 138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).
We sent a notice letter to the Oregon secretary of state on behalf of ourselves, the Constitution Party of Oregon and an Oregon registered voter, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. Our notice letter to Oregon serves as a “pre-suit” notice.
The letter states:
According to your state’s responses to the EAC’s [federal government’s Election Assistance Commission] survey, 19 Oregon counties reported removing zero voter registrations from November 2020 to November 2022 pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA for failing to respond to a Confirmation Notice and failing to vote in two consecutive general federal elections. Another 10 counties reported just a handful of such removals during the same two-year period.
Furthermore, not a single one of Oregon’s 36 counties reported any data whatsoever to the EAC regarding inactive registrations. Instead, in the relevant column where the data should have been, the survey response for each of Oregon’s counties merely stated, “Data not available.”
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Oregon’s non-compliance with the NVRA is further illustrated by the unusually high registration rates observed in several of its counties. Comparing the data your state reported to the EAC regarding the total registrations for each county to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent five-year estimates of the numbers of resident citizens over the age of eighteen suggests that eight Oregon counties have more voter registrations than citizens of voting age. Several federal courts have determined that such high registration rates are sufficient grounds for alleging a failure to comply with the NVRA’s requirement to make reasonable efforts to remove voters by reason of death or change of address.
States are required by federal law to report data concerning their removal programs to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Every few years the EAC publishes this data as part of a report it provides to Congress. The most recent report and accompanying datasets were released in June of this year.
Dirty election rolls can mean dirty elections. With a presidential election less than four months away, it is vital that Oregon get about the business of cleaning its voter registration rolls of ineligible voters to eliminate any cloud of doubt over the legitimacy of its balloting.
We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls across the country, among other achievements.
Robert Popper, our senior attorney, leads our 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.
A hearing was recently held in another case we filed that challenges a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as late as five business days after Election Day.
In May 2024, we sued California to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of us and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).
In December 2023, we sent three other notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. In response to our inquiries, Washington, D.C., officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”
In July 2023 we filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study we conducted in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
In July 2023, we also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from us. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, we filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois’ voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle our NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide us with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit we filed in 2017.
We settled a 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 of our lawsuits.
In February 2022, we 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 our challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
This leadership for election integrity only happens because of the generous support of our members. If you aren’t a part of Judicial Watch’s cause and movement, I encourage you to support us right here! And if you have already supported our work, thank you – and I encourage you to make another donation because you know the fight never stops!
Judicial Watch Suit Seeks Edited Transcripts of Biden Special Counsel Interviews
The Biden Justice Department is engaged in a major league cover-up for Joe Biden. Hiding audio recordings, altering transcripts, and ignoring FOIA law shows that the Biden team is desperate to avoid disclosure about Joe Biden’s cognitive condition.
We just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records of communication between the agency and the White House regarding the altered transcripts of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s October 2023 interviews of President Biden in the criminal investigation into Biden’s theft and disclosure of classified records (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02176)). The lawsuit is one of three federal FOIA lawsuits we filed this week concerning the Hur investigation.
(In a separate lawsuit, we forced the Biden administration to admit that the transcripts of the audio recordings have been altered and are not accurate.)
We filed the lawsuit after the Justice Department inadequately responded to a FOIA request on June 1, 2024, for:
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of the Executive Office of the President regarding the creation, editing, or release of the transcript of the interviews of President Biden by Special Counsel Robert Hur on October 8, 2023 and October 9, 2023. This request includes, but is not limited to, all such communications including Mr. Hur and/or any other official or employee assigned to or employed by Mr. Hur’s office.
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and the court reporter(s) responsible for the creation or editing of the transcripts of the interviews described in part one of this request and/or any other officer, employee, or representative of Free State Reporting, Inc. This request includes, but is not limited to, all such communications including Mr. Hur and/or any other official or employee assigned to or employed by Mr. Hur’s office.
All directions, instructions, or other guidance documents provided to the court reporter(s) responsible for the creation or editing of the transcripts of the interviews described in part one of this request and/or any other officer, employee, or representative of Free State Reporting, Inc. regarding the creation or editing of those transcripts.
Also this week, we filed two other FOIA lawsuits, one for the background materials referenced in Hur’s February 2020 report (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02177) and one for all communications about the Hur report with the Office of the White House Counsel and Biden’s personal lawyers (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02179)).
On February 5, 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur issued the “Report of the Special Counsel on the Investigation Into Unauthorized Removal, Retention, and Disclosure of Classified Documents Discovered at Locations Including the Penn Biden Center and the Delaware Private Residence of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”
In the report, Hur called Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and declined to charge Biden with a “serious felony:”
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.
Prior to the finalization of the report, the White House issued a letter to the Special Counsel’s office attacking the report’s “treatment of President Biden’s memory,” and added “there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions …”
And with all the well-placed concern about Joe Biden’s cognitive status, the public interest in the release of the tapes is as important than ever. The court could rule at any time so check back for updates!
Statement on President Biden’s Decision to Step Down from the Presidential Campaign
President Joe Biden’s resignation from the presidential race is the result of a corrupt, arrogant, and anti-democratic process. Biden was forced to pull out of the presidential race as the result of a dangerously corrupt pressure campaign led by Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and like-minded Democrats, which has effectively disenfranchised 14 million Americans who voted in the Democratic presidential primaries.
Few Americans will buy the DC establishment’s scheme to remove Biden from the presidential campaign over cognitive issues while ignoring his inability to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Vice President Kamala Harris and the majority of the cabinet need to step up and invoke the 25th Amendment. And, Congress should do an emergency investigation into Biden’s fitness for office. The assassination attempt on former President Trump adds increased urgency to ensure we have a fully capable president. This is truly a national security crisis.
And to make matters worse, we have this “coup against democracy,” as the Left likes to say. We are not going to know who the nominee of the Democratic Party for the office of president of the United States will be until August. It’s election interference, pure and simple. There is nothing about this process that’s normal, appropriate or honest.
A snap national primary (or primaries) to pick a new nominee would seem to be the most “democratic” approach to Biden’s decision not to seek reelection. At a minimum, a careful state-by-state and federal legal analysis is a necessary first step to help determine whether Biden can be replaced on the presidential ballot at this late stage in the presidential campaign. Judicial Watch is already investigating this election integrity issue. That the votes of 14 million Americans would be casually tossed aside by Democratic Party elites is a major corruption and election interference scandal.
Pentagon DEI Budget Surges for Woke Training to Root out ‘White Privilege’
Our Corruption Chronicles blog has carefully documented the dangerous woke ideology ruining our military. As you can see from our latest report, the Leftist abuse and waste seem to be getting worse:
The Pentagon dedicates tens of millions of dollars annually to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the armed forces and cadets at the nation’s military academies receive extensive training about racism, sexism, unconscious bias, and intersectionality.
A year-long research project conducted by a special commission at a public university think tank has uncovered the unbelievable details behind a costly Department of Defense (DOD) initiative to root out so-called white privilege white supremacy in the military. The study, conducted by the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University (ASU), began as a review of civic education in the military and uncovered a fervent woke movement throughout the nation’s armed forces. “Our research team did not expect to find Critical Race Theory so embedded and pervasive,” the center’s director, Donald T. Critchlow, an ASU American political history professor, writes in the introduction of a recently published report. He confirms that there is CRT and DEI training across the military from the Pentagon through the ranks.
It is important to note that the sole purpose of the U.S. armed forces is to defend the nation against external enemies, therefore the DOD’s mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure the country’s security. The agency is the government’s largest with 3.4 million service members and civilians—in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard—stationed at 4,800 sites in over 160 countries. Under the Biden administration the DOD budget for DEI training has increased significantly from $68 million in fiscal year 2022 to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023, the report states. The agency is requesting a whopping $114.7 million for fiscal year 2024, according to DOD figures obtained by ASU researchers. “Training is implemented by a vast DEI bureaucracy that extends from senior leaders at the Pentagon to the lowest ranks,” the report says, adding that the “U.S. military now has a well-developed, taxpayer-funded DEI bureaucracy dedicated to rooting out ‘white privilege’ and white supremacy, and that allows for (and sometimes teaches) the overt criticism of the United States, its founding, its founders, and its founding documents, alleging that they are all rooted in systemic racism.”
Few training modules are available to the public, but the report includes enough to get the full picture. The Air Force teaches airmen to use proper pronouns as an element of inclusion and its Air Combat Command toolkit features examinations of white privilege. An Army course on race and gender in American military history defines racism as a possibility for a dominant group, while people of color merely express prejudice and gender as a social construct. The Navy promotes a “sailor’s drag show aboard a warship” and its anti-extremist training considers the violent and radical Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to be a positive, apolitical public policy issue. A Marine Corps CRT course emphasizes diversity and inclusion while claiming that colorblindness is unsound because it protects white supremacy. The Marine Corps has also launched a special initiative “to eradicate racism, sexism, and negative biases that diminish our warfighting effectiveness.”
The military academies all have federally mandated offices of diversity and inclusion that coordinate training and support based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and promote celebrations based on those identities. West Point offers a minor in diversity and inclusion studies and courses such as “social inequality” as well as classes that focus on feminist and queer theory. The Air Force Academy has a Transgender Working Group and U.S. history is an optional elective while required classes cover BLM, the New York Times’ 1619 project that aims to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States” and white fragility. The Naval Academy requires faculty to attend a diversity and inclusion conference and future Humanities and Social Sciences instructors to submit diversity statements describing how they will contribute to the academy’s diversity and inclusion mission.
In the last few years we have sued the DOD to obtain more information about the military’s outrageous DEI initiatives, including anti-American CRT propaganda at three academies. In 2022 we received hundreds of pages of records outlining CRT instruction at West Point that includes material on “whiteness,” a social science class on race, gender, and sexuality that focuses on queer theory, and a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.” Months later, we obtained the Air Force Academy’s CRT training of cadets that shows the academy has made race and gender instruction a top priority. This includes a race, gender and sexuality course as a core class and mandatory training for cadets and staff on DEI concepts and skills to decrease incidents of microaggressions and unconscious bias. A cultural immersion movie nights initiative was also launched to teach cadets about racism, racial discrimination and the several historical events and policies that have impacted minorities through cinema.
Who Is Kamala Harris?
Our chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison covers the rise of Kamal Harris (and certain fact the Big Media don’t want you to know) in Judicial Watch’s Investigative Bulletin:
The world will quickly be getting to know presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Her long relationship—personal and political—with the scandal-scarred California power broker Willie Brown is instructive. Brown was instrumental in Harris’s rise in California politics. In return, she may have protected him and his allies from damaging investigations.
Brown rose through the ranks of the California State Assembly and became Speaker in 1980. He served in that post for fourteen years, ruling with an iron fist in a velvet glove, rewarding allies with lucrative patronage posts and punishing opponents. He called himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly.” In 1996, he was elected mayor of San Francisco, serving two terms. Along the way, he attracted the attention of the FBI, which repeatedly investigated him but failed to bring charges.
The FBI may have failed, but Brown had plenty of critics. “The legacy of Willie Brown has been one of corruption and incompetence in government, and the [FBI] probes were a reflection of that,” the head of San Francisco Common Cause told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.
By 2004, Brown was on his term-limited way out of office, but one of his key allies, Kamala Harris, was on her way up. Harris was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2003. Brown had put his formidable political machine behind Harris, swinging a come-from-behind election her way.
It was not the first time Willie Brown had given Kamala Harris a helping hand. The two dated in 1994 and 1995. In 1994, Brown appointed the then-obscure county prosecutor to two influential state commissions—the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. Harris’s political rise was launched—elected DA in 2003 and 2007, California Attorney General in 2010 and 2014, United States Senator in 2016, and Vice President in 2020.
Questions persist about what Harris may have done for Brown and his allies. The investigative journalist Peter Schweizer noted in a recent interview with Breitbart that in her first DA race, Harris ran against the incumbent prosecutor, who was investigating corruption allegations against Brown. “And when she won,” Schweizer said, “she dropped a whole series of cases” connected to Brown.
The biggest case, Schweizer said, involves an 800-page document from the diocese of the Catholic Church in San Francisco detailing accusations of sexual abuse linked to “individuals and entities” with connections to the Democratic Party. But when “Kamala Harris came in, not only did she not prosecute anybody involved in the scandals, she actually refused to release the 800-page document. And it has been reported in San Francisco, that document disappeared and never was to be found.”
Those are serious charges that raise serious questions. What cases were dropped when Kamala Harris became San Francisco DA? Does she appear in records of FBI investigations of Willie Brown? What became of the San Francisco diocese investigation? Where is the 800-page report? Judicial Watch is investigating these issues and other matters linked to Democratic Party power brokers in California.
As for Willie Brown, now 90, he remains a strong Harris supporter. In a hastily called sidewalk press conference after President Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Brown suggested that the president should resign immediately, stepping aside for Harris.
A Biden resignation would “silence all of this nonsense about how to select some new nominee,” Brown said. “Her chances go up if he would at this moment say not only am I no longer the candidate, I’m no longer the president—she is.”