With many allegations surrounding the November election, I wondered how many states, if any, might have overstated the number of registered voters when compared with how many were actually eligible to cast a ballot.
The answer would be important information for all of us to have, regardless of our political preferences. Trustworthy elections provide the bedrock of our democratic republic.
I didn't look far before discovering the findings of a Judicial Watch study that reportedly found 1.8 million excess "ghost" voters in 353 counties across 29 states.
Judicial Watch reports the data it discovered "highlights the recklessness of mailing blindly ballots and ballot applications to voter registration lists. Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections," said the organization's president, Tom Fitton.
Who is Judicial Watch? It defines itself as "a conservative nonpartisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law." It "advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation's public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people."
Judicial Watch in October filed a federal lawsuit against Colorado, which it says leads the nation in percentage of counties with more than 100 percent of eligible voters registered to vote.
The resulting report found seven other states with statewide registration rates that exceeded 100 percent of voting-age population: Alaska, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Of the 29 states with counties reporting voter registrations over 100 percent, Alabama had 25, Michigan 68, Georgia 23, Tennessee 36 and Virginia 24.
But the organization's overall picture of the obvious need to review, purge and reform voter rolls remains incomplete since some states and the District of Columbia didn't post adequate online data to determine voter registration rates by county when compared with eligible population. Others don't post adequate online information showing voter registration rates. As a result, the organization said its study was limited to the 37 states that regularly post updates to their registration data.
This important issue has been on Judicial Watch's front burner for a while now, as evidenced by the lawsuits filed and resolved with several states. In 2020 the organization sued Pennsylvania and North Carolina for allegedly failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls as required under federal law.
Those suits allege both states have nearly 2 million inactive names on their registration rolls. Judicial Watch has also sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter data, also in violation of federal law.
Nearly three years ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a cleanup of voter rolls following the organization's settlement with Ohio. California also settled a lawsuit with Judicial Watch and, as a result, began erasing as many as 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County voter rolls, the organization said, adding that as a result of a consent degree, Kentucky began to clean up of hundreds of thousands of old registrations.
It's reassuring for me to know there's an organization that is actively involved in correcting these inflated numbers, while at the same time, it leads me to wonder why every last state doesn't keep these numbers lawfully pruned each year.
Beware, Facebook buyers
Perhaps you, too, have learned the hard way that ordering merchandise from Facebook advertisers invites the peril of trusting strangers with your credit card information.
Seems like it's always some form of ripoff nowadays, doesn't it?
I've paid for but never received four separate items over the past year. Then what? Who does one complain to? And where does that lead? Nowhere, my friends. Plus you leave your credit card information hanging out in cyberspace at a time when hackers are sophisticated enough to hack into our federal government and beyond.
I do realize one way to effectively remedy this (so far, anyway) is to place my order through PayPal or Amazon, both of which have relatively secure purchasing policies in place.
This becomes particularly relevant when I read that we spent $188.2 billion in online shopping over the 2020 holiday season, representing a more than 30 percent increase over the previous year. Online spending topped $1 billion daily during the 2020 holiday season, and on 50 days exceeded $2 billion.
How about you? Ever ordered items online, or via Facebook, that have never shown up?
Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly how you want them to treat you.
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Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master's journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at [email protected].