248 counties ordered to scrub voter rolls; suit filed in Ky. over 'dirtiest election rolls in the country' - Entrepreneur Generations

A conservative advocacy group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation sent letters threatening a federal lawsuit to 248 county election officials in 12 states around the country in September, ordering them to scrub voters from their rolls who had died, moved, or were ineligible.

Anderson County, Ky.
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Purging voter rolls is an issue mired in partisan arguing and fraught with errors and flaws. "Conservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers' jobs harder," Michael Wines reports for The New York Times. "Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, in turn, say that the benefits are mostly imaginary, and that the purges are intended to reduce the number of minority, poor and young voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.

In Anderson County, Ky., which received a letter, County Clerk Jason Denny said it's possible there are more registered than eligible voters, but said his office can't clean up the voter rolls. "We’re not allowed to touch them . . . Only the state Board of Elections can purge them," he told Ben Carlson of The Anderson County News. "We have no way of knowing if anything corrupt is going on."

Judicial Watch, a conservative group connected with PILF, has filed a federal suit against the state of Kentucky. President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton said "Kentucky has perhaps the dirtiest election rolls in the country" and that "dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections."

Denny told Carlson that his office takes care to notify the state Office of Vital Statistics about deaths in the county, which is suppose to cause the deceased to be removed from voter rolls. He thinks bad census numbers may be partially to blame. "Some people don’t fill out the census honestly because they don’t want to be counted," Denny said. "But, they register to vote because they want to vote, and that makes it look skewed."

If that's the case, such discrepancies may continue to show up: the 2020 census will shift toward a more online model of self-reporting, which could cause rural areas to be undercounted.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2Bih9fd 248 counties ordered to scrub voter rolls; suit filed in Ky. over 'dirtiest election rolls in the country' - Entrepreneur Generations

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