Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – Montgomery County has more names on its voter registration rolls than it has residents who are eligible to vote, and a conservative non-partisan group threatened to sue the state of Maryland unless it updates the county’s rolls.
The county has a registration rate of 104 percent according to Judicial Watch, which means there are people on the rolls who shouldn’t be.
The director of Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project Robert Popper said they arrived at the number by dividing the total voter registration in the county by the estimates of citizens eligible to vote.
The group gets the number of eligible voters from calculations done by the American Community Survey.
Popper said it’s not only illegal to not update registration rolls, but it also opens up the county to possible voter fraud.
“If we sue, we look at how old the registrations, how long they have been ineligible or cancelable, whether people were contacted as they need to be under the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] and asked if they still reside in the state, whether confirmation notices were sent, whether they were returned, whether deceased voters were on the rolls,” said Popper.
To prepare for a lawsuit they would also look to see if people have been casting ballots using the names of ineligible voters left on the rolls.
Judicial Watch sent a notice letter to county and state officials that told them they would sue if the rolls weren’t updated in 90 days. That 90 day period ends July 11.
As of the time this story was written, Popper said they had not received a response from the county or state.
WMAL reached out to the Maryland Board of Elections but didn’t hear back.
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