Garden State Times

A federal judge ruled this week that New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way must turn over documents and correspondence related to the office’s procedures for removing duplicate registrations from the voter rolls. The office has 45 days to comply.

The Nov. 9 ruling by U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey Chief Judge Freda Wolfson was a victory for the public’s right to know how voter rolls are being maintained, said Lauren Bowman, spokeswoman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). PILF filed the lawsuit back in May.

“Transparency is essential to free and fair elections,” Bowman told the Garden State Times. “This ruling vindicates the public’s right to know about errors in the voter rolls. These documents will allow us to understand why New Jersey’s voter rolls contains thousands of duplicates.”

PILF

The results of a PILF study published in June showed thousands of instances where voters’ names are stored in duplicate.

“Tens of thousands of other voter records were highlighted for missing or fictitious biographical information like dates of birth,” a summary of the study stated. “These represent current and future problems with voter roll list maintenance that the Garden State needs to address.”

The rolls also contain the names of 2,398, who according to their listed dates of birth, are 105 years of age or older.

PILF notified the Secretary of State’s office about the discrepancies, but the office allegedly refused to hand over documents showing how it maintains the voter lists, including its procedures for removing duplicate registrations.

Citing the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA), PILF sued on the allegations that the NVRA requires states to reveal how voter rolls are maintained.

In her ruling, Wolfson turned down PILF’s request to view the state’s voter module, an instructional manual part of the Statewide Voter Registration Statistics Archive. The Secretary of State’s office contended that the module contains no voter registration information.

But the judge ruled that instructions, “including email correspondence, and hand-written notes” on the maintenance of the rolls be turned over. Wolfson also directed Way's office to search state records and “produce any informal instructions (such as emails to or from county officials) and hand-written notes related to identifying, merging, cancelling duplicate voter registration records.”

A 2020 PILF investigation into the 2018 elections found “37,889 likely duplicate registrants are apparently credited for casting two votes from the same address, and 34,000 registrants appear to have voted from non-residential addresses.”