More than 3.5 million people in the U.S. are registered to vote than are alive among America’s adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to vote fraud.
The Election Integrity Project of Judicial Watch — a Washington-based legal-watchdog group — analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 to 2015 American Community Survey and last month’s statistics from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The latter included figures provided by 38 states.
According to Judicial Watch, 11 states gave the EAC insufficient or questionable information. Pennsylvania’s legitimate numbers place it just below the over-registration threshold.
My tabulation of Judicial Watch’s state-by-state results yielded 462 counties where the registration rate exceeded 100 percent. There were 3,551,760 more people registered to vote than adult U.S. citizens who inhabit these counties.
Judicial Watch attorney Robert Popper told me, "That’s enough over-registered voters to populate a ghost-state about the size of Connecticut."
Among some 2,500 U.S. counties for which Judicial Watch had data, these 462 counties (18.5 percent of those studied) exhibit this ghost-voter problem. These range from 101 percent over-registration in Delaware’s New Castle County to New Mexico’s Harding County, where there are 62 percent more registered voters than living, breathing adult citizens.
Washington’s Clark County is worrisome, given its 154 percent over-registration rate. This includes 166,811 ghost voters. Georgia’s Fulton County seems less nettlesome at 108 percent over-registration, but for the 53,172 Atlantans who compose that figure.
But California’s San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138 percent over-registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters. Los Angeles County’s 112 percent rate equals 707,475 over-registrations.
Beyond the official data that it received, Judicial Watch reports that Los Angeles County employees, "informed us that the total number of registered voters now stands at a number that is a whopping 144 percent of the total number of resident citizens of voting age."
All told, California is a veritable haunted house, teeming with 1,736,556 ghost voters. Judicial Watch last week wrote Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla and authorities in 11 counties and documented how their election records are in shambles.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, "California’s voting rolls are an absolute mess that undermines the very idea of clean elections." Fitton added, "It is urgent that California take reasonable steps to clean up its rolls. We will sue if state officials fail to act."
Ronald Reagan’s California has devolved into a reliably far-left stronghold. While pristine voter rolls should be a given in a constitutional republic with democratic elections, even that improvement might be too little to make the Golden State competitive in presidential elections.
The same cannot be said for battleground states, in which Electoral College votes can be decided by incredibly narrow margins. Consider the multitude of ghost voters in the following states:
President Donald J. Trump’s supporters might be intrigued to learn that Hillary Clinton’s margins of victory in Colorado and New Hampshire were lower than the numbers of ghost voters in those states. Clinton’s fans should know that Trump won Michigan and North Carolina by fewer ballots than ghost voters in those states.
Perhaps these facts will encourage Democrats to join GOP-dominated efforts to remove ineligible felons, ex-residents, non-citizens, and dead people from the voter rolls — for all contests, not just presidential races.
Under federal law, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the 2002 Help America Vote Act require states to maintain accurate voter lists. Nonetheless, some state politicians ignore this law. Governor Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., vetoed a measure mandating investigations of elections in which ballots outnumbered eligible voters.
Even more suspiciously, when GOP Governor Rick Scott tried to obey these laws and update Florida’s records, including deleting 51,308 deceased voters, Obama’s Justice Department sued to stop him.
Whether Americans consider vote fraud a Republican hoax, a Democratic tactic, or something in between, everyone should agree that it’s past time to exorcise ghost voters from the polls.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. He has been a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Read more opinions from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.
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