White County was among 24 Illinois counties on a list of jurisdictions accused of having insufficient voting records because it's required to keep a record of active and inactive voters, County Clerk Paula Dozier told SW Illinois News.
The list “isn’t an accurate count of registered voters,” Dozier said. “Inactive voters must remain on the inactive registration list for two federal election cycles, or four years.”
Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that promotes transparency and accuracy in government, sent notice-of-violation letters telling county officials to update their records or face legal action after 90 days.
To make sure voting records are kept up to date, Illinois requires all counties to purge, or update voter registration information, every two years in the summer. According to data released by the state elections board, White County had 516 inactive voters and 10,696 active voters.
Dozier said White County purged more than 250 names from the voter inactive list since April 21.
“The remaining inactive voters will not be removed until the statutory time frame, of which a portion will be removed after March 2018 and November 2018,” she said. “Please be aware in trying to keep active voter registration files accurate, many will be added to the inactive list as well.”
The Illinois State Board of Elections sent a response to Judicial Watch on April 17.
“Please note that in looking at the effectiveness of a jurisdiction’s voter list maintenance efforts, one must focus on the active voter totals,” the letter stated. “We get periodic letters from other so called 'watchdog' groups and though they may be well intentioned, it seems that they most often go astray in their analysis by improperly including the inactive voters in the voter total.”
This is not the first time Judicial Watch has accused a state of having insufficient voting records or followed up with legal action. In 2014, Judicial Watch won a legal battle with the state of Indiana to force the state to clean up voter registration rolls.
“We are pleased that our lawsuit forced the State of Indiana to fix its broken system for protecting the integrity of the electoral process,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “It took a federal lawsuit to spur the state legislature to reform Indiana’s electoral process and force Secretary of State [Connie] Lawson to finally clean the badly outdated Indiana voter rolls.”
Alerts Sign-up