The Election Commission of Clarke County, Mississippi is being sued for having more registered voters than it has citizens eligible to vote. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit elections watchdog, filed the lawsuit on Monday, alleging the election commission violated Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by failing to reasonably maintain voter rolls. Such negligence not only facilitates fraud, but also violates federal law, notes PJMedia.
In March, Clarke County had 12,646 registered voters, but only had a voting-age population of 12,549, according to the suit.
"More than 100 percent of living citizens old enough to vote were registered to vote in Clarke County in 2015," the complaint states.
The plaintiff, American Civil Rights Union, sent a letter to the election commission last year describing potential violations of federal election law and asking for a review of election records, but the commission never replied, so it decided to take legal action.
"Clarke County has had longstanding problems maintaining plausible numbers of registrants on the polls," the suit says. "During the 2010 federal general election, over 101 percent of living citizens eligible to vote in Clarke County were registered to vote. Defendant is responsible for allowing this circumstance to occur. By failing to implement a program which takes reasonable steps to cure these circumstances, Defendant has violated NVRA and other federal maintenance statutes."
NVRA requires counties to make a "reasonable effort" to remove the names of ineligible voters from the voter rolls when they die or move to another jurisdiction.
Public Interest Legal Foundation said its lawsuit is part of an effort "to clean corrupted voter rolls around the nation ahead of the 2016 Presidential election," and even blamed the Obama administration for making the situation worse.
"The Obama Justice Department has shut down enforcement of Section 8 of the NVRA and thus allowed voters rolls around the nation to remain corrupted and filled with ineligible registrations," the group said. "The plaintiff, through lawyers in this case, have brought similar lawsuits and obtained consent decrees against other Mississippi counties for corrupted voter rolls."
The American Civil Rights Union also sued Walthall County, Mississippi in 2013 for having 124 percent more registered voters than voting-age residents, reported the Blaze.
And it is not just Mississippi violating the voter registration act.
In 2012, there were 24 counties in Iowa that had more people registered to vote than were living. Also in 2012, Colorado had over 20 counties with more registered voters than people alive. And in Illinois in 2011, fourteen of the state's 102 counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents, according to the Huffington Post.
