Hillary: GOP will ‘steal votes’ as states struggle on outdated voter rolls
While Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on Bernie Sanders grabbed the headlines, the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nominee also directed her ire at the Republican Party, claiming it plans to “steal votes” in the upcoming election.
States like Georgia and Wisconsin are struggling with the issue of outdated voter rolls, overloaded with obsolete records and deceased voters still eligible to vote. Democrats denounce efforts to clean up these rolls as “voter purges” that they say are actually designed to deny citizens their right to vote.
In the same Hollywood Reporter interview in which she claimed “nobody likes Bernie Sanders,” Clinton claimed that “Republicans and their allies” are trying to make it harder for voters to participate in the
2020 election. “That means you’ve got to deal with voter suppression, because they’ll steal votes or they’ll prevent votes from happening,” Clinton said.
“They’re now trying to purge voters so that they can try to limit the electorate,” she said, adding that she believes voter suppression was one reason she lost to Donald Trump. According to a federal lawsuit filed late last year, the city of Detroit has 106 registered voters for every 100 adult U.S. citizens in the city. Thousands of people are registered multiple times under their same names and more than 2,500 registered
Motor City voters are actually dead.
As a result, some states are attempting to clean up their voter rolls and make them current, an effort some Democrats and progressive activists oppose. In Wisconsin, an appeals court on Jan. 14 put on hold an order to immediately remove up to 209,000 names from the state’s voter registration rolls, handing Democrats — who had fought the move — a victory in a state Trump carried by just 23,000 votes in 2016. The appeals court sided with the bipartisan state elections commission, which decided not to remove any voters while the court fight continues.
Wisconsin’s presidential primary is April 7 and the issue is unlikely to be resolved in court before the presidential election.
The conservative law firm that brought the case — the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty — wanted the purge to happen before the election.