Montgomery Board of Elections Responds to Judicial Watch Claims

Government watchdog Judicial Watch claimed in April that Montgomery County had not done enough to clean out its voter rolls. The D.C.-based organization based the claim on a surprising statistic: the county Board of Elections has more registered voters than the U.S. census has voting-age adults tallied for the county.

Board of Elections president Jim Shalleck has responded with a memo with points Judicial Watch failed to consider.

Judicial Watch said it threatened to sue if counties in 11 states didn’t clean voter rolls to make them more accurate. Montgomery County was the only county in Maryland listed. The organization claimed the counties were not conducting reasonable voter registration record maintenance.

The Montgomery board letter pointed out that Judicial Watch failed to take note of the thousands of 16- and 17-year-olds who have pre-registered to vote under Maryland law. The teenagers are registered, but they cannot vote. In an interview, Shalleck said he estimated the county had between 7,000 to 8,000 16- and 17-year-olds that have registered.

Another is that the county has thousands of residents in the military or government agencies who are serving overseas. They’re registered to vote in the county but they can’t be counted in the census. In the interview, Shalleck estimated the category included 7,000 to 8,000 registered voters.

Judicial Watch was still reviewing Shalleck’s response Tuesday, and it had no comment, said Jill Farrell, the organization’s director of public affairs.

“The bottom line is we do not have more voters than adults as Judicial Watch alleges. … If there was voter fraud, Larry Hogan would not be governor,” said Shalleck, a Republican member of the board.

Here is the entirety of the board’s letter:

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