Judicial Watch announced today it 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 grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit on their behalf in the United States District Court in the Northern District of Illinois in electronic format, with all fields provided to political committees, including but not limited to fields indicating the registrant's full name residential street address email address telephone number, county and state voter identification number, age of the registrant, and the registrant's status and the most recent date the entry was changed, and voting history for the last fifteen elections.
In 2021, Judge Ellis ruled on a motion in the case that, "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that" Illinois law "Conflicts with" and "And frustrates the NVRA's purpose of providing voter information to the public to help ensure the accuracy and currency of voter registration rolls." She also allowed a claim to proceed under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, on the ground that political committees in Illinois can access copies of the voter registration database while ordinary citizens cannot.
A forthcoming Judicial Watch study, based on recent census data and information Illinois reported to the federal Election Assistance Commission, reveals that 14% of Illinois' counties have more registered voters than citizens over 18, while Illinois as a whole has close to 800,000 inactive registrants.
As several federal courts have recognized, the public records provisions of the National Voter Registration Act were intended to enhance the ability of private groups to monitor whether states are removing ineligible voters from their voter rolls.
Judicial Watch 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.
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.
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