Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch have been very busy over the years trying to hold the left to account.

They don’t always win, but their record as of late is astonishingly good and they just scored another huge win in California and how the state maintains its voter rolls.

Our democracy depends on fair elections and clean voter rolls are essential to ensure that our elections remain clean and fair.

Loading...

From The Free Beacon: California and Los Angeles County have agreed to purge as many as 1.5 million inactive voter registrations across the state as part of a court settlement finalized this week with Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog.

Judicial Watch sued the county and state voter-registration agencies, arguing that the California government was not complying with a federal law requiring the removal of inactive registrations that remain after two general elections, or two to four years.

Inactive voter registrations, for the most part, occur when voters move to another country or state or pass away but remain on the rolls. The lawsuit alleged that Los Angeles County, with its more than 10 million residents, has more voter registrations than it has citizens old enough to register with a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population.

The entire state of California had a registration rate of 101 percent of age-eligible citizens, the lawsuit said, citing data published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The settlement is a third statewide voter-registration legal agreement or court order reached between Judicial Watch and states; the others were reached with government entities in Ohio in 2014 and Kentucky last year.

“This settlement vindicates Judicial Watch’s groundbreaking lawsuits to clean up state voter rolls to help ensure cleaner elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Fitton said the California settlement would “clean up election rolls in Los Angeles County and California—and set a nationwide precedent to ensure that states take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.”

Secretary of State Alex Padilla said state officials “have and will continue to meet the goals of the National Voter Registration Act”—the federal law at issue in the case—in “maintaining the accuracy of voter rolls and increasing the number of eligible citizens who register and vote.”

Padilla tried to assure California voters that it would not lead to “unnecessary removal of active and eligible voters.”

“Safeguards remain in place to ensure voter-list maintenance procedures are followed before canceling any voter registration records,” Padilla said in a statement.

He also took a shot at Judicial Watch, arguing that the group’s statements about the settlement “conflates their unfounded claims with what was actually agreed upon in the settlement” but did not elaborate about what constituted an “unfounded claim” by the conservative group.

“The settlement is clear and simple: California will continue its work to adhere to modern list maintenance procedures under the [National Voter Registration Act],” he said.