Well then, that's just dumb. What is shows is that people move, and some places grow in population.
But thanks for posting that. I thought it was a genuine problem. I knew it wasn't evidence of vote fraud, but the sheer number of issues seemed like a big problem.
It is somewhat of a concern. But I would argue that it is not a significant one.
Judicial Watch is a conservative group. They have won some lawsuits and gotten consent agreements claiming that states are not purging voter registration records as required under the National Voter Registration Act.
I disagree somewhat with the assessment in the Snopes article. This isn't comparing apples and oranges. Maybe comparing Red Delicious and Granny Smith, but it is still and apples to apples comparison, to the extent of what it is actually studying.
The population values are obviously not current population values. Of course, even the census is not a totally accurate count. And these are using estimates from multi-year surveys. But it looks to me like they are fairly accurate. That's close enough to make some reasonable assessments.
The egregious problem with the Judicial Watch study is that the voter to population percentage is based on total registered voters in a county, which includes inactive registered voters.
As populations change, voter registrations becoming inactive is what we expect. If you use their data and look at active voter registrations the issues are much smaller.
I tried to get the data but the original data is very large and the Judicial Watch data is downloadable but it for some reason is in PDF format instead of something usable like CSV, and the PDF has inconsistent formatting make it difficult to convert.
Just looking at the data, I would guess that using the proper active voter registration would reduce their over 100% by at least 90%.
That still leaves a number of counties with more active voter registrations than population. But some of those could be differences because of the older population data, or the way registrations and populations values or calculated (for example, students, who may be eligible to register at their parent's address or their college address), or other factors.
And for some of the counties with declining populations it is just practical that it takes time for the registrations to get purged. A county may know that there on more registered voters than the population, but how do they find out who should be inactivated?
How much time and money and resources do we need to put into making things perfect when everything seems to be working very well with extremely little problems?
