More than 50,000 discrepancies have been discovered in the state of New York’s voter registration rolls, including deceased registrants, placeholder or fictitious birthdates, and duplicate entries, according to an election security watchdog’s findings shared with the Washington Examiner.
Among the alarming revelations, Public Interest Legal Foundation, PILF, a law firm focused on voting integrity, found 49,933 out-of-state double registrants, who are voters simultaneously registered in New York and at least one other U.S. state.
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PILF cross-referenced voting registration files for New York registrants who also appear on other state voter rolls. Based on comparative analysis between voter datasets, the majority of interstate duplicates came from Florida (24,873). Other overlaps were with North Carolina (6,247) and New Jersey (5,724).
PILF additionally detected 2,823 inter-county duplicates inside New York’s statewide database, including 1,018 pairs marked as “active” registrants across multiple counties.
At least 3,845 registrant records in New York were flagged for containing placeholder, potentially fake, or implausible dates of birth, such as “1850-01-01,” despite recent voting activity.
WHAT ARE THOUSANDS OF INELIGIBLE VOTERS DOING ON THE ROLLS?
For example, the registration rolls incorrectly listed a woman’s birth year as “1901,” but the Brooklyn voter in question was actually born in 1941.
According to PILF’s investigation, six registrants had died as far back as 1998, yet remained actively registered on the rolls, while four registrants could not be matched to any known Social Security number or credit data at those addresses. The only proof of existence was the New York voter roll, per PILF, raising questions about their identities and voting eligibility.
PILF also identified 6,788 instances of duplicated and even triplicated registrants, in which duplications at identical residential addresses were generated.
The PILF research team studied same-address duplicates along common causes of duplication, such as missing Social Security information, typographical errors (e.g., misspelling of names), hyphenated or married-name confusion, and nickname variations. Notably, missing or transposed Social Security numbers can stifle standard de-duplication procedures, PILF says.
PILF flagged the tens of thousands of questionable voter registrations in a memo sent Monday to the New York State Board of Elections.
“These are critical failures that put election security at risk,” PILF president J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “New York needs to start addressing these issues now.”
Accordingly, PILF is requesting a meeting with the state’s election board to discuss reforms and the voter registration data.
When the Washington Examiner contacted the New York State Board of Elections for comment, a public information officer confirmed receipt of PILF’s letter and said counsel is reviewing it at this time.
Not just New York
PILF previously conducted similar reviews in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maine, as part of nationwide efforts to clean up registration rolls ahead of high-stakes races. The results were similarly egregious, with PILF detecting 18,453 deceased registrants on Maine’s voting rolls.
The legal group is calling for greater transparency and collaboration with local election officials to fix these problems before out-of-date or inaccurate data affects future elections.
“This is not just a New York issue,” PILF research director Logan Churchwell added. “Our work in multiple states proves that voter roll maintenance is falling behind across the country. But New York’s numbers are some of the worst we’ve seen yet.”
A federal issue facing Democratic pushback
PILF’s letter looped in Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and former PILF litigation counsel Maureen Riordan, now the DOJ’s chief voting oversight officer.
At the direction of President Donald Trump via executive order, the DOJ has been contacting a number of states, including election battlegrounds, seeking access to their respective registration rolls. The stated purpose is ensuring state-by-state compliance with federal voting law. Reportedly, all states will eventually be contacted about their adherence to federal election regulations.
To date, the DOJ has contacted election officials in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
In response to one request, Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who infamously tried to boot Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot, told the DOJ to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”
BATTLEGROUNDS NEVADA AND WISCONSIN AMONG STATES WITH VOTER ROLLS UNDER DOJ SCRUTINY
At a hearing last week on voter roll maintenance standards at the House Administration Committee, which has oversight over federal elections, PILF’s president advocated for full disclosure of voting data. “Without transparency, you can’t know what’s going on, and that’s why it’s so important,” Adams told the congressional committee.
In opening statements, the top Democrat on the panel accused Republicans, who want to limit voting rights to eligible Americans, of engaging in regressive practices that bring the country back 200 years.
“For over 200 years, our republic has marched towards a fuller, freer system of governance, expanding access to the ballot for more and more Americans,” ranking member Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) said. “But as we’ve seen time and time again in the topic of today’s hearing, clearly indicates House Republicans seem to want to retreat from that important promise.”
Morelle claimed that “illegal” GOP-led voter purges, particularly targeting non-citizen voting, are restricting voting rights without due process. “Voter purges represent a coordinated effort by my friends on the other side of the aisle to manipulate elections — to, in effect, make American elections less American,” the New York Democrat said.
THERE IS ONLY ONE REASON DEMOCRATS WANT TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR NONCITIZENS TO VOTE
“There was a time in America when both Republicans and Democrats would have both been in favor of cleaning dead voters from the rolls,” PILF communications director Douglas Blair told the Washington Examiner. “This should be a bipartisan issue. It’s deeply disappointing that Public Interest Legal Foundation has seen such pushback to something that used to be common sense.”