Federal Judge Dismisses Part of Right-Wing Lawsuit Seeking To Purge Illinois Voters

A federal judge partially dismissed a lawsuit led by the right-wing group Judicial Watch seeking to gain access to Illinois voter registration records and remove allegedly ineligible individuals from the rolls.
Obama-appointed Judge Sara Ellis found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the state’s voter roll maintenance policies, but allowed Judicial Watch’s effort to access voter registration records to proceed. Plaintiffs have until Nov. 29 to file an amended complaint on their voter roll maintenance claim.
Back in March, Judicial Watch — alongside voters and other conservative groups — filed a complaint accusing Illinois election officials of failing to remove adequate numbers of ineligible voters from the state’s registration list. The organization maintained that the state’s lack of sufficient voter roll maintenance would increase “the opportunity for ineligible voters or voters intent on fraud to cast ballots.”
According to the lawsuit, 23 Illinois counties reported 980,089 total voter registrations as of November 2022, but removed a combined total of 100 voters over a two year period. In certain counties, the lawsuit said zero voters were removed from the rolls between 2020 and 2022.
Judicial Watch argued that Illinois’s “absurdly small” number of removals of ineligible voters who have changed residence — as well as the state’s refusal to provide requested voter data — violated the federal National Voter Registration Act (NRVA).
However, state officials refuted these claims and asserted that the state is making “more than a reasonable effort to remove ineligible voters from their statewide voter registration list.” The officials noted that during the time period at issue in the case, the state removed 692,003 ineligible voters — representing 7.9% of Illinois’ total registered voters.
The lawsuit relied on “fearmongering claims, such as election fraud and vote dilution that are too speculative to represent concrete and particularized injuries,” the Illinois State Board of Elections stated in its motion to dismiss.
The Illinois AFL-CIO and the Illinois Federation of Teachers — labor organizations that intervened in the litigation — wrote in a court brief that the suit “tellingly” did not “point to a single erroneous registration on Illinois’s voter rolls.”
And while Judicial Watch argued that it was unlawfully denied access to certain voter data, the state board countered that it told the group the information it was seeking would need to be obtained from local, rather than state, election authorities.
For many years, Judicial Watch has been involved in right-wing “election integrity” lawsuits, including many efforts to purge voters. More recently, numerous other right-wing groups have filed similar cases targeting voter list maintenance and seeking access to voter rolls. Critics tracking the proliferation of attempted voter purges by states and right-wing litigants have warned that these efforts can often be flawed and result in the unlawful removal of eligible voters.
Democracy Docket is tracking nearly two dozen active lawsuits across 13 states targeting voter rolls — an issue that has proven to be a central focus of conservatives’ legal strategy throughout the 2024 election cycle.