This post first appeared at Fellowship of the Minds
In 2017, Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project examined the 2011-2015 data of two groups: the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the federal Election Assistance Commission.
Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor and a contributing editor of National Review Online, tabulated Judicial Watch’s data and found 462 counties (18.5% of the 2,500 counties studied) where the registration rate exceeded 100%. Altogether, there were 3,551,760 more people registered to vote than the adult U.S. citizens in these counties — enough over-registered voters to populate a ghost-state about the size of Connecticut, according to Judicial Watch attorney Robert Popper.
Here are some counties where registered voters outnumber adult citizens:
- 101% registration rate in Delaware’s New Castle County.
- 108% registration rate in Georgia’s Fulton County.
- 112% registration rate (or 707,475 ghost voters) in California’s Los Angeles County.
- 138% registration rate (or 810,966 ghost voters) in California’s San Diego County.
- 154% registration rate in Washington’s Clark County.
- 162% registration rate in New Mexico’s Harding County, where there were 62% more registered voters than adult citizens.
More troubling still are the numbers of ghost voters in battleground states where Electoral College votes can be decided by incredibly narrow margins:
- Colorado: 159,373
- Florida: 100,782
- Iowa: 31,077
- Michigan: 225,235
- New Hampshire: 8,211
- North Carolina: 189,721
- Virginia: 89,979
Murdock points out that in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s margins of victory in Colorado (136,386) and New Hampshire (2,736) were less than the numbers of ghost voters in those states, while Trump won Michigan (10,704) and North Carolina (173,315) by fewer ballots than ghost voters in those states.
Dead voters account for some of the over-registration rate.
In May 2016, KCBS-Los Angeles reported that 265 dead voters had cast ballots in southern California “year after year.” In October 2016, CBS Chicago compared local vote records with the Social Security Administration’s master death file, and found 119 dead people had voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.
