Judicial Watch, the watchdog organization, is suing California election officials to force them to remove ineligible and inactive registrants from the state’s voter rolls.
The lawsuit, filed this month, urges the court to force California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) to abide by the voter list maintenance requirements included in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
According to the lawsuit, officials in 21 California counties removed five or fewer registrants from their voter rolls in its latest statewide clean-up ranging from November 2020 to November 2022. Of those 21 counties, 16 counties removed zero registrants.
Altogether, the 21 counties removed just 11 registrants from their voter rolls despite having nearly six million registrants total.
For comparison, officials in San Diego County, California, from November 2020 to November 2022, removed more than 130,000 registrants out of the 2.3 million registrants on their voter rolls.
In addition, Judicial Watch alleges that 16 other California counties were unable to disclose how many registrants were removed during the two-year period. These 16 counties, combined, represent nearly 30 percent of the state’s population.
“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. And California’s voting rolls continue to be a mess,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “Judicial Watch litigation already caused the state to remove over a million outdated names from the rolls in California but our new lawsuit shows there is more work to do.”
Indeed, in February of last year, Judicial Watch announced that a settlement agreement with Los Angeles County forced election officials to remove more than 1.2 million registrants from the county’s voter rolls.
With its latest lawsuit, Judicial Watch is hoping for a similar clean-up in the counties where few registrants have been removed from voter rolls.
The case is Judicial Watch v. Weber, No. 2:24-cv-3750 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
