Fairfax County Has More Registered Voters than Adults Old Enough to Vote

Be sure to vote — but in only one jurisdiction!

More Northern Virginia news you will never read in the Washington Post… Fairfax County has a registration rate of 105%, according to conservative activist group Judicial Watch. In other words, the number of voter registrations exceeds the number of citizens in the county old enough to  vote.

During the last reporting period, the county removed only 5,800 voter registrations per year due to failure of registrants to respond to address-confirmation notices and failure to vote in two consecutive elections. “This is a very low number of removals for a county of this size,” said Judicial Watch in a letter to Gary D. Scott, the county registrar and director of elections. (The county population is about 1.15 million.)

Judicial Watch is not alleging that any voter fraud has occurred. Rather, the organization contends that Fairfax County is failing to comply with federal law.

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a press release. “It is common sense that voters who die or move away be removed from the voting rolls.”

The letter to the Fairfax County registrar was one of 19 sent to election registration officials in large counties around the country after a comparison of the number of registered voters with the county’s population. As the letter to Scott explains, “An unusually high registration rate suggests that a jurisdiction is not removing voters who have died or who have moved elsewhere.”

Bacon’s bottom line: Why not be diligent about cleaning up voter registration rolls? Who does it hurt? … Or does this just constitute another form of “voter suppression”?

— JAB