The second-largest county in the crucial swing state of Florida has more registered voters than the number of voting-eligible adults, according to a lawsuit filed this week in federal court.

The American Civil Rights Union, the conservative counterpart to the American Civil Liberties Union, brought the suit against Broward County under the National Voter Registration Act. Joseph Vanderhulft, a litigation counsel for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said it is not clear whether the numbers in Broward are due to fraud or merely sloppiness.

“Our point is that regardless of what it is … we have a problem with the numbers.”

“Our point is that regardless of what it is … we have a problem with the numbers,” he said. “The National Voter Registration Act gives independent authority to try to get it straightened out.”

The suit alleges that the number of registered voters was 103 percent of the number of voting-eligible adults at the time of the 2014 general election.

Burnadette Norris-Weeks, an elections attorney with the county, told the Miami Herald that her office would not comment until it has been formally served with the suit.

Broward, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than a 2-1 margin, is one of seven jurisdictions that have been sued by the Public Interest Legal Foundation over voter registration discrepancies. The organization last year published a list of 141 counties in 21 states where voters exceeded voting-age adults.

Broward resident Andrea Bellitto and the American Civil Rights Union are named plaintiffs.

“When a county has more people registered to vote than there are eligible residents, it’s an open door for vote fraud,” ACRU Chairwoman and CEO Susan A. Carleson said in a statement. “Corrupted voter rolls are the first step to vote fraud. Broward’s Supervisor of Elections, Dr. Brenda Snipes, is not using all of the tools available to keep Florida elections clean.”

[lz_table title=”Voting Lawsuits” source=”Public Interest Legal Foundation”]Suits alleging corrupted voter rolls
|Defendant,Date Filed
Broward County (Fla.),June 27
Alexandria (Va.),April 7
Philadelphia,April 5
Starr County (Texas),March 4
Noxubee County (Miss.),Nov. 12
Clarke County (Miss.),July 27*
|
*Case settled
[/lz_table]

The suit, filed in the federal court in Fort Lauderdale, alleges that Broward officials rebuffed requests to clean up the voter rolls. Snipes rejected a request on April 5 to set up a meeting to discuss remedial steps, according to the civil complaint.

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Snipes also insisted that the number of registered voters never has exceeded the number of county residents since she took office in 2003. But Vanderhulft told LifeZette that the key statistic is not the number of residents but the number of adults who are eligible to vote. The suit notes that the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that in 2014, 13 percent of the county’s residents — some 256,430 — were non-citizens.

During the past five years, according to the complaint, Broward elections officials removed just 18 people from the rolls for not being citizens.

“This problem has persisted over several election cycles,” the complaint states. “According to U.S. Census Bureau and Election Assistance Commission data, at the time of the 2010 general election, approximately 106 percent of the citizens of voting age were registered to vote and could cast a ballot in Broward County.”

Keeping up with changes in the voter rolls can be difficult, especially in jurisdictions with rapidly changing populations, because people often neglect to notify voter registration offices when they move. But Vanderhulft said there are many steps that Broward officials could take to improve the integrity of the election system.

The county could subscribe to national databases and examine death registries and post office records to remove ineligible voters. The suit contends that the county has failed to act on reliable information that voters have either died or moved. The suit singles out 200 people in the Wynmoor community of Coconut Creek who died or moved.

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Broward also “undertakes absolutely no effort whatsoever to use data available from the Broward County Circuit Court Clerk obtained from jury excusal forms” in order to remove people who have been excused from jury duty because they are not citizens, the suit states.

The plaintiffs seek a court order mandating that Broward take reasonable steps to clean up the voter rolls in time for the 2016 election.

Vanderhulft said his organization has been able to negotiate “very positive consent decrees” in other cases. The federal statute provides for private citizens to bring legal action against voter registration officials, although lawmakers assumed the Department of Justice would take the lead in challenging suspect voter registration figures.

“We haven’t really been getting much enforcement from the current department,” Vanderhulft said.