New York Sued for Failing to Remove Ineligible Voters from Voter Rolls

Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against New York election officials, accusing them of failing to remove ineligible voters from the state’s voter rolls.

The watchdog group filed the lawsuit on Wednesday after they claimed that New York election officials have violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by removing just 22 individuals from New York City’s voter rolls in the last six years.

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, and New York City’s rolls are some of the dirtiest in the country,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Specifically, the lawsuit questions how New York election officials are maintaining their voter rolls in regards to “NVRA removals,” which refers to cases where an individual was registered to vote but moved out of the jurisdiction or where an individual has failed to respond to an official address confirmation and has not voted in two subsequent federal elections.

As the lawsuit notes, despite having more than 5.5 million registered voters on New York City’s voter rolls, election officials made only one NVRA removal from the voter rolls from November 2016 to November 2020.

Judicial Watch compiled the data in their lawsuit:

Fitton said:

Elections officials in New York City have simply refused to clean the voter lists for years. We want cleaner elections, as the law requires, and we expect this lawsuit will cause New York to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls the names of hundreds of thousands of voters who have moved away or died.

Judicial Watch is asking the district court to declare that New York election officials have violated terms of the NVRA and require them to reasonably maintain their voter rolls in compliance with federal law.

The case is Judicial Watch v. Valentine, No. 1:22-cv-03952 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.