00:00The gentleman yields back. The gentleman from Illinois is recognized for five minutes.
00:06Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing today on the critical issue of maintaining the integrity of our voter rolls,
00:15or in the case of Illinois, restoring the integrity of our voter rolls.
00:20Ensuring that voter rolls are accurate and contain only eligible voters is essential to the public's confidence in our elections.
00:29For far too long, states like Illinois have failed to uphold the law and carry out their responsibilities under the National Voter Registration Act.
00:40I was pleased to see that the Department of Justice recently filed a statement of interest in Judicial Watch's lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections.
00:50As noted in Judicial Watch's lawsuit, Illinois has refused to develop a statewide program for voter roll maintenance.
01:00In fact, the DOJ intervention in Illinois found, according to the 2022 Election Administration Voting Survey conducted by the Election Assistance Commission,
01:11Unbelievably, 34 jurisdictions in Illinois simply failed to report any data regarding list maintenance removals under the National Voter Registration Act.
01:25Nineteen of these 34 counties failed to report any data regarding registrants removed due to death,
01:34meaning no one died in 19 counties.
01:38Do we believe that?
01:39And then, obviously, we're keeping these people on the voter rolls.
01:43In 23 Illinois counties, fewer than 100 registrations were canceled during a two-year period.
01:51Out of almost one million registrations, which Judicial Watch notes is an absurdly small number,
02:00and demonstrates Illinois' lack of commitment to maintain clean voter rolls under the NVRA.
02:07As this committee is well aware, Illinois has a history of voting irregularities,
02:16and I appreciate the opportunity to highlight this important issue today.
02:21So, Mr. Adams, what is required under the Reasonable Effort Standard for voter list maintenance?
02:28Almost nothing, and that's what, in my written testimony, you'll find the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.
02:33If you have a program, it's good enough.
02:35It doesn't matter if the proof is in the pudding.
02:37It doesn't matter if it's effective.
02:39One thing Congress might do on the data that you just talked about, Congressman Miller,
02:43is when I was at the Justice Department, I brought the case of United States versus Alabama,
02:48and I brought the case of United States versus Vermont, and those two states were not reporting the data
02:54that you were just talking about, but it's only for UOCAVA voters, for military voters.
02:58There's no obligation in the statute to report those data for regular voters.
03:04Congress just left out regular voters when they did the NVRA for the EVE survey.
03:09That's what you're referring to, it's EVE, the Election Assistance Commission.
03:12You might extend that to the entire survey, that states have to do that.
03:16It's optional.
03:17They don't have to report any data unless it's a military voter.
03:21Well, that's why we're having this hearing, to highlight this and to make changes.
03:26So, Mr. Reamer, as a former Virginia State Board of Elections official,
03:31how do election officials traditionally prescribe regulations to conduct voter-less maintenance?
03:39Absolutely.
03:40It is a combination of statutory obligations that the General Assembly in Virginia set,
03:48which complement the NVRA.
03:50And while I was in Virginia, Governor McDonnell was very aggressive about beefing up the statutory provisions
03:58that we had to follow.
04:00We had to do annual reports to the General Assembly, outlining in detail our list maintenance activities.
04:07There were more frequent checks that we had to make as well.
04:10The issue I brought up about finding the 10,000 dead voters on our voter rolls that had been there for so long,
04:17that's something that should have been caught.
04:20But no one had ever gone back and said,
04:22let's take a look at the entire death file and compare it against the voter registration list.
04:27Everyone just assumed that these periodic comparisons were catching all the dead voters, but they weren't.
04:33And for some reason, we had this large pile of them on there.
04:35So, these were all things that were enshrined in the law that we had to follow.
04:40And I think a lot of states could use more statutes and more regulations,
04:45just being more prescriptive in what they need to do.
04:47So, how often did the state direct appropriate departments or officials to remove ineligible voter registrants?
04:55As frequently as possible.
04:56As frequently as possible.
04:58We made a major cancellation leading up to the 2013 general election, promptly got sued.
05:05We got sued several times on list maintenance issues because of how aggressive we were in the state.
