As Election Day November 3 nears tensions in the country continue to run high. The candidates, parties, and voters are expressing worry over mail-in balloting which is being promoted over in-person voting due to the recent pandemic. In the midst of this unease, the Illinois Conservative Union (ICU), along with Judicial Watch, have filed suit against the Illinois State Board of Elections (SBE).

The suit, filed September 21, stems from a request for a list of voter data sent by the ICU to the Illinois State Board of Elections in August 2019, which was denied. According to Judicial Watch, the request sought “information about the maintenance of voter rolls, including the most recent voter registration list for Illinois.” The complaint filed in filed in court states the request noted the records “would be used solely for purposes intended by federal law, namely, to ensure the accuracy and currency of the official list of eligible voters.”

The Election Board denied the request based on the claim that only governmental bodies and political committees were allowed to view such records. A few members of the Illinois Conservative Union were eventually allowed to visit the Board of Elections office in Springfield to review Illinois’ millions of voter records. However, they could only do so “one at a time on a computer terminal, with no ability to sort or organize records,” said Judicial Watch.

In November 2019, the ICU sent the Board of Elections a notice of violation and did not receive a response. As a result, the Illinois Conservative Union determined the Illinois State Board of Elections and its director had violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 by not allowing it access to public voter registration records.

A media release from the Illinois Conservative Union stated, “The SBE refusal to provide voter data as requested is contrary to multiple court decisions around the country ruling that citizen rights to voter data under the NVRA cannot be infringed by state law.”

The attorney handling the case is David Shestokas, who is also an advisor to the Heartland Institute. “ICU’s original request, followed by the notice of violation to Executive Director Steve Sandvoss and the Board of Elections, advised SBE of the federal court orders ruling that the NVRA supersedes state law,” he noted. “The Board’s obligations are clear. Failing to comply results in a waste of taxpayer resources and has delayed ICU’s work on behalf of Illinois voters.”

Its partner in the suit, Judicial Watch, is a Washington D.C. based conservative action group that files Freedom of Information requests on government officials and agencies to investigate alleged misconduct. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court in the Northern District of Illinois (Illinois Conservative Union et al v. Illinois et al. No. 1:20-cv-05542).

According to Judicial Watch, its research has discovered 14 out of 102 counties (14% of all counties) in Illinois “have more registered voters than citizens over 18, while the state as a whole has 660,000 inactive registrants.”

“This lawsuit aims to open up Illinois voting records so private groups can tell whether they are dirty,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Illinois voters and citizens have a right to review election rolls under federal law and Illinois’ refusal to make them available suggests the state knows the rolls are a mess and won’t stand the light of the day.”

Carol Davis is Chair of the Illinois Conservative Union. “When crafting the NVRA, the intent of Congress was to enable the public to monitor the accuracy of our nation’s voter rolls,” she said. “By denying citizens access to the rolls, state election authorities are thwarting the intent of this legislation, specifically Section 8. Illinois has long been the target of jokes about our elections, such as ‘dead people voting’. Now is the time to verify the accuracy of Illinois voter rolls and put an end to our state’s embarrassing reputation regarding the lack of election integrity.”

Judicial Watch isn’t the only organization that has found irregularities in the state’s voter rolls.

In January 2020, WGN Chicago reported a “programming error in a signature pad at driver services facilities led to hundreds of non-U.S. citizens accidentally being registered as voters.” Once the problem was discovered it was fixed, and of the 574 individuals who were registered to vote, only 16 did.

Written by Hans von Spakovsky

If you have no idea what happened at the second meeting of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in New Hampshire on Sept. 12, I’m not surprised.

Though a horde of reporters attended the meeting, almost all of the media stories that emerged from it simply repeated the progressive left’s mantra that the commission is a “sham.”

Almost no one covered the substantive and very concerning testimony of 10 expert witnesses on the problems that exist in our voter registration and election system.

The witnesses included academics, election lawyers, state election officials, data analysts, software experts, and computer scientists.

The existing and potential problems they exposed would give any American with any common sense and any concern for our democratic process cause for alarm.

The first panel included Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services Inc., and John Lott. They testified about historical election turnout statistics and the effects of election integrity issues on voter confidence.

Lott also testified that his statistical analyses show that contrary to the narrative myth pushed by some, voter ID does not depress voter turnout. In fact, there is some evidence that it may increase turnout because it increases public confidence in elections.

In a second panel, Donald Palmer, the former chief election official in two states—Florida and Virginia—testified about the problems that exist in state voter registration systems.

He made a series of recommendations to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, including working toward “interoperability” of state voter lists so that states “can identify and remove duplicate registration of citizens who are registered to vote in more than one state.”

Robert Popper, a former Justice Department lawyer now with Judicial Watch, testified about the failure of the Justice Department to enforce the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act that require states to maintain the accuracy of their voter lists.

He said there has been a “pervasive failure by state and county officials” to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, and complained about the under-enforcement of state laws against voter fraud.

Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems gave a stunning report on the comparison that his company did of voter registration and voter history data from 21 states. He discussed how difficult and expensive it was to get voter data from many states—data that is supposed to be freely available to the public.

According to Block, “the variability in access, quality, cost, and data provided impedes the ability to examine voter activity between states.”

Yet using an extremely conservative matching formula that included name, birthdate, and Social Security number, Block found approximately 8,500 voters who voted in two different states in the November 2016 election, including 200 couples who voted illegally together. He estimated that “there would be 40,000 duplicate votes if data from every state were available.”

Of those duplicate voters, 2,200 cast a ballot in Florida—four times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. His analysis “indicates a high likelihood [of] voter fraud” and that there is “likely much more to be found.”

As a member of the commission, I testified about The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database. That non-comprehensive database has 1,071 examples of proven incidents of fraud ranging from one illegal vote to hundreds. It includes 938 criminal convictions, 43 civil penalties, and miscellaneous other cases.

Heritage is about to add another 19 cases to the database. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, since many cases are never prosecuted and there is no central source for information on election fraud.

The commission also heard about a report published by Shawn Jasper, the Republican speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. That report stated that over 6,500 individuals in 2016 used an out-of-state driver’s license to take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration law to register and vote on Election Day.

Despite a law that requires an individual with an out-of-state license to obtain a New Hampshire license within 60 days of establishing residency in the state, only 15.5 percent have done so.

Many have tried to explain this away be saying those voters must all have been college students living in New Hampshire. Perhaps that is true.

But it may also be true that voters from Massachusetts and other surrounding states decided to take advantage of New Hampshire’s law to cross the border and vote in a presidential and Senate race, which were decided by only 3,000 and 1,000 voters, respectively.

Of course, we won’t know the truth of what happened unless we do what should be done, and what the commission’s critics don’t want to be done: investigate these cases.

Finally, the commission heard from three computer experts—Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Ronald Rivest of MIT, and Harri Hursti of Nordic Innovation Labs. Their testimony about the ability of hackers to get into electronic voting equipment and just about every other device that uses the internet (and even those that don’t) was chilling.

As Appel stated, our challenge is to ensure that when voters go to the polls, they can “trust that their votes will be recorded accurately, counted accurately, and aggregated accurately.” He made a series of “technological and organization” recommendations for achieving that objective.

All in all, the Sept. 12 meeting, which was hosted by Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s longtime Democratic secretary of state, was both informative and comprehensive. But anyone who didn’t attend would never know that based on the skimpy and biased coverage it received in the media.

The hearing is evidence of the good work the commission is already doing in bringing to light the problems we face in ensuring the integrity of our election process.

This article was originally posted at The Daily Signal.