California’s top elections officer and 11 county registrars have been asked to hand over detailed voter registration records or face a federal lawsuit, a request that centers on new accusations that the records are inaccurate.
The effort by the conservative-leaning organization Judicial Watch seeks an explanation for what its attorneys contend are official records that don’t match the group’s estimates of the legally eligible voting population in the counties, including Los Angeles County….
The exact size of the alleged errors is unclear. Judicial Watch declined a request from the Los Angeles Times to provide the full details of its voter registration analysis.
Dean Logan, the registrar of voters for Los Angeles County, countered that the two lists are quite different. He said the inactive voter list is more like “a fail-safe to make sure that people are not administratively disenfranchised.”
Even then, elections officials argue the lists shouldn’t be compared with ACS data, which are compiled with caveats about population accuracy.
“Voter registration is not a survey,” Gail Pellerin, registrar of voters in Santa Cruz County, said in questioning Judicial Watch’s methodology. “We deal in real facts.”
“We may be in litigation shortly,” Popper said when asked why the information won’t be shared.
Those details, however, are at the heart of the complaint. Judicial Watch alleges that adding together the active and inactive voter lists in the 11 counties produces a total number of voters significantly larger than the estimate of voting-age citizens calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The organization used the ACS five-year average for its baseline of eligible voters….
See also Sac Bee: More voters than eligible adults? Group makes dubious claim about California