The national conservative organization Judicial Watch says Colorado’s Jefferson County is one of 19 counties in five states that don’t comply with federal election law.

The allegation is that the county and state don’t do enough to purge ineligible voters, meaning people who have died or moved.

Judicial Watch alleges there are more registered voters in Jefferson County than there are adults over the age of 18.

That claim isn’t backed up by the U.S. Census and voter registration numbers, however. The census says there are 580,233 residents of Jefferson County, and 60,835 are younger than 18, for a difference of 519,398 residents of voting age.

There are 387,237 active registered voters, according to the Secretary of State’s voter registration statistics for December. There are just 44,660 registered inactive voters.

The organization cited the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 in notice-of-violation letters sent Thursday, warning that Judicial Watch would sue if remedies weren’t produced in 90 days.

Judd Choate, the director of elections for the Secretary of State’s Office said Judicial Watch is using active and inactive voters in its calculation. While inactive voters are still registered, they don’t automatically receive a ballot in the mail and “will eventually be cancelled if the county does not receive updated address information from the voter.”

He said federal law blocks immediately cancelling inactive records before two general elections pass.

“Judicial Watch’s calculation completely fails to take this aspect of federal law into consideration,” Choate said. “Jefferson County, like all counties in Colorado, regularly conducts list maintenance activity, including the cancellation of voters who are dead, who are incarcerated for a felony, and who move and register in a different state. Judicial Watch’s calculations also fail to take these list maintenance activities into account.”

The Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder’s Office provided a response Monday:

“The Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder’s office takes its public duty to ensure the integrity of our elections process very seriously. We are proud that more than 90% of eligible Jeffco residents are registered to vote. At the same time, we recognize that makes us a target for those using questionable math to imply that we have more registered voters than are eligible or that we are not complying with federal law as it relates to the removal of inactive voters. Both contentions are patently false.

“We take the maintenance of our voter rolls very seriously, including the daily removal of felons, the monthly removal of hundreds of individuals who have died and the removal of anyone else who is permitted by law. Under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), we as a county are prohibited from removing inactive voters from the registration rolls unless they meet specific criteria, including first becoming inactive and then failing to respond to mail and vote in two federal elections. While Judicial Watch’s letter to us claims that Jeffco has removed “only about 6,100 voter registrations per year during the last reporting period,” these numbers are quite off. After the last federal election, 20,830 voters were removed from Jeffco’s rolls.”

A noted defender of President Trump, who routinely questions election integrity, Judicial Watch says its analysis found 378 counties nationwide with more registered voters than living citizens. A press release Thursday pointed to cities in Southern California, while 11 of the 19 counties targeted with lawsuit threats are in Golden State, where Trump isn’t likely to do well because of the state’s preference for Democrats, where he lost by 30 percentage points, or about 4 million votes, in 2016.

He has tweeted allegations of widespread voter fraud in California, yet has not substantiated the claim.

Four counties flagged by Judicial Watch are in Pennsylvania, a state critical to Trump’s re-election this year.

Trump lost Jeffco in 2016 by nearly 8%, a difference of 21,599 votes. 

“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,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a statement. “Previous Judicial Watch lawsuits have already led to major cleanups in California, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio — but more needs to be done. It is common sense that voters who die or move away be removed from the voting rolls.”

A 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2018, won by conservatives, upheld states’ authority to purge voter rolls of people who have missed a few elections, and Judicial Watch has been pushing the issue on cleaning up voter rolls.

A year ago, California state election officials reached a settlement with the organization over handling inactive voter records in relation to a 2017 lawsuit that asserted that Los Angeles County and the state failed to meet federal elections requirements.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with a quote from the Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder’s Office.