Lawsuit settlement forces LA County to remove 1.2 million ineligible voters from voter rolls

A Judicial Watch lawsuit filed against Los Angeles County 2017 (Judicial Watch, Inc., et al. v. Dean C. Logan, et al. has resulted in a settlement agreement forcing Los Angeles County to clean up its voter rolls by removing over one million "inactive" voters.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit on its own behalf and on behalf of four lawfully registered voters in Los Angeles County and the Election Integrity Project California, Inc., a public interest group involved in monitoring California’s voter rolls.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Los Angeles County sent almost 1.6 million address confirmation notices to voters listed as “inactive” on its voter rolls.

Under the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), voters who do not respond to the notices and who do not vote in the following two federal elections must be removed from the voter rolls.

The settlement also required an update to the state’s online NVRA manual to make it clear that ineligible names must be removed and to notify each California county that it is obliged to do this. 

In the most recent of a series of progress reports sent to Judicial Watch, Los Angeles County confirmed that a total of 1.2 million ineligible and inactive voters were recently removed from the rolls.

Los Angeles County confirmed last year that 634,000 of its inactive voters hadn’t voted in at least 10 years.

Judicial Watch had previously detailed that Los Angeles County had allowed more than 20% of its registered voters to become inactive without removing them from the voter list.

This long overdue voter roll clean-up of 1.2 million registrations in Los Angeles County is a historic victory and means California elections are less at risk for fraud,” said Judicial Watch President. Building on this success, Judicial Watch will continue its lawsuits and activism to clean up voter rolls and to promote and protect cleaner elections.

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch President

Read the lawsuit complaint here.