With the presidential contest in the home stretch, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton is out today with a timely new book that devotes a lot of space to electoral duplicity in pursuit of power. But the problem is bigger than elections alone, Tom warns. America’s constitutional republic is in crisis.
Tom credits the collaborative efforts of the Judicial Watch team and the generous backing of millions of JW supporters for the book, “Rights and Freedoms in Peril: An Investigative Report on the Left’s Attack on America.”
“Rights and Freedoms in Peril” covers many subjects—the crisis at the border, the long “lawfare” campaign against Donald Trump, unanswered questions about the origin of Covid, diversity scams, the events of January 6. But the unifying thread of the book—the issue in stark display as American head to the polls to elect a new president—is threats to the republic. “Politicized indictments, ruined elections, invasions, and compromised politicians,” Tom warns, “have placed our republican form of government in peril.”
As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battle to lead the nation, Judicial Watch is closely monitoring developments across the country. “Election integrity has been a core issue for Judicial Watch for decades,” Tom writes. “Nothing is more important to the functioning of a democratic system than public confidence that voting is conducted in a clear and transparent manner.”
Judicial Watch is the national leader in the critical task of cleaning up dirty voter rolls—that is, ensuring that voter rolls are not populated by voters who have died, or moved away from their place of residence and failed to change their voter registration, as required by the National Voter Registration Act. These “zombie registrations” can cause terrible trouble at the polls.
In 2020, a Judicial Watch investigation revealed that 353 counties nationwide had a combined voter registration of about 1.8 million above the 100 percent registration mark. That is, the counties were showing voter registrations significantly above the number of citizens living in each county and old enough to vote.
Those are highly significant numbers.
“Remember,” Tom writes, “that in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin by 22,000 votes; in Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes; and in Michigan by around 10,000 votes. Those margins made the difference in the Electoral College.”
And in 2020, “Biden beat Trump in Georgia by 12,000 votes, in Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, and in Pennsylvania by 77,000 votes. Those margins made Biden the president.”
In other words, dirty voter rolls have the potential to swing close elections—and not just for president, but up and down the ballot.
Judicial Watch works overtime to hold the states accountable, pressuring them through legal and investigative efforts to clean up their voter rolls. Legal pressure from Judicial Watch has resulted in the removal of more than four million ineligible voters from voter rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere.
“Our concern, historically, has not been that millions of Americans are actually going back to their old place of residence so they can vote twice, or voting in the name of their deceased relatives,” Tom writes. “The concern is that dirty voting rolls are a potential pool of names for fraudsters to use, that unlawful or poor voter roll maintenance suggests other deficiencies of election mismanagement, and that dirty voter rolls undermine public confidence in election outcomes.”
But dirty voter rolls are not the only threat to election integrity. Tom drills down into the many current political practices—among them, opposition to voter ID laws, the use of mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, and expanded interpretations of “election day”—that open the way to voter fraud.
Common-sense voter ID laws are opposed by the Democratic Party and the Left, Tom notes. But their claim that these laws suppress voter turnout has never been proved by the evidence from actual elections.
The use of mail-in ballots exploded in the Covid era. But as far back as 2005, the bipartisan federal Carter-Baker Commission concluded that these type of ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
Ballot harvesting—permitting the unlimited collection of ballots by hired guns and campaign workers—has given rise to a new class of election hustlers, Tom writes. The “new profession of ‘ballot brokers’… target apartment blocks or nursing homes and stand by to ‘assist’ residents with filling out and delivering ballots.”
As for Election Day in America, in many states it is now becoming an expanded Election Season. Judicial Watch went to court in Illinois, and later in Mississippi, when the states sought to expand Election Day beyond the date established by federal law. As Tom noted at the time of the Illinois case, the common-sense interpretation of federal law is that “we are supposed to have an Election Day, not Election Week—or months.”
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Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch. Tips: mmorrison@judicialwatch.org
Investigative Bulletin is published by Judicial Watch. Reprints and media inquiries: jfarrell@judicialwatch.org