Some states do better than others when it comes to voter registration and participation, with the ideal goal being to eventually get every eligible voter to take part. But what if you could manage to have more than 100% voter registration? Wouldn’t that be even better? This is no longer just a pipe dream. According to a new study conducted by Judicial Watch, 350 counties in eight U.S. states have more registered voters than there are people living there according to the most recent census numbers. And we’re not just talking about a handful of people over the limit. The grand total adds up to enough votes to swing any number of congressional races. (Free Beacon)
More than 350 U.S. counties have more registered voters than people eligible to vote, resulting in 1.8 million “extra” voters, according to a new Judicial Watch study.
By comparing publicly available voter registration data with the most recent Census Bureau population numbers, Judicial Watch found that statewide voter registration in eight states—Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—exceeds 100 percent of eligible voters. Loving County, Texas, had the highest number of excess voters, with a registration rate of 187 percent.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the report highlights a problem specific to mail-in voting: Many election officials automatically send ballots or ballot applications to everyone on the list of registered voters without first removing the “ghost” voters.
Proving that this isn’t any sort of issue specific to red or blue states, you see some of each on the list. The biggest offender is one county in Texas with a very impressive 187% voter registration rate. They must give away cookies with each form filled out or something.
As noted in the Free Beacon, however, this isn’t a case of massive voter fraud. Or at least not in all cases. This is yet another symptom of an issue that we’ve touched on here repeatedly. Most of the states don’t do nearly enough (if anything) to maintain their voter rolls and keep them clean. They’re pretty good at adding new voters to the roll when they take the initiative to register. But when people move out of their precinct, unless they take the initiative to update their registration, it doesn’t get done. Similarly, when people die, most states have no mechanism in place to automatically delete them.
This is a problem that’s been known about for a while now but hasn’t really been enough of an issue to require a huge investment in fixing it. But that’s changing now that we’re entering the era of massive mail-in voting numbers. In most, previous election cycles, there didn’t tend to be all that many absentee ballots. And the people who go to all the trouble of requesting one need to provide their address, so the registration information should generally be correct. And in a worst-case scenario, if some of the ballots wind up being messed up, there generally aren’t enough of them to throw off even a local village council race.
But now we have states sending out ballots to every single person on the rolls. And a lot of those people either don’t live at the listed address anymore or they simply aren’t living at all. We can take that list of states with all of the “extra” voters and compare it to the list of states that sent or are sending ballots to everyone who is registered. Colorado, New Jersey, and Vermont are all on the list. So each of those states are sending out more ballots than there are currently people drawing breath in their territory.
But don’t worry folks. I’m sure it’s all going to work out just fine. Sleep tight.
