DOJ: Don't Be Removing those Fake Voters, Now

People in several states are cleaning up the voter rolls. In Georgia, fake names get added back in almost as soon as they're cleared out the first time.

After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.

She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature.

The DOJ says such states had better be careful, and stop well before the election.

The Justice Department issued a warning to states Monday to tread lightly in trying to clean up their election systems of bogus names and ineligible voters, firing a shot across the bow of GOP-led states that have been trying to erase noncitizens from their rolls.... the department said federal law allows states to clean their rolls, but it must be done within strict guidelines and only for approved reasons such as a voter has moved out of the jurisdiction, has died or has requested removal.

Someone who has been inactive can be removed only after being notified and failing to show up for two more federal elections.

Changes cannot be made too close to an election.

All the way at the end of the article, you get an appreciation of the scale.

Voting rights groups argue that noncitizen voting is rare.

Republican state officials, though, say they’re finding plenty of evidence noncitizens have signed up.

Virginia said it removed 6,303 names of noncitizens from its rolls.

Texas, meanwhile, says it has culled 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from its rolls since 2021. That’s part of a broader purge of 1.1 million names, including 457,000 dead people, 463,000 inactive people, 65,000 who didn’t respond to notices and 134,000 who said they had moved.

Of the noncitizens, Texas said 1,930 had voted in elections before.

Two thousand in an election of millions is not a big deal, probably; but half a million dead people and half a million inactive names is a big deal when it's now standard practice to send out tons of mail-in ballots, and accept them without signature matching when they return.