On Friday, Townhall posted an article written by Victor Davis Hanson about cleaning up our voter rolls. The number of dead people and people who are not citizens who are voting in our elections matters. Every illegal vote cancels out a legal vote.

The article reports:

For decades, America’s voter roll maintenance system has been running on fumes. It still relies on tools like the Postal Service’s National Change of Address database and the Social Security Death Index- once considered cutting-edge but now hopelessly outdated. These systems were designed for a world where people moved less, technology was slower, and data sharing across states was primitive. That world no longer exists.

…A growing number of election administrators are finding that the answer isn’t another lawsuit or government database—it’s commercial data. Credit bureaus and identity verification systems used by banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders already maintain the most accurate, continuously updated records of where people live and who they are. These tools, offered by firms such as Experian, TransUnion, and Thomson Reuters, can revolutionize voter roll maintenance.

Take Tarrant County, Texas. In 2025, the county contracted with Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR system to verify voter registration data in real-time. Within seconds, officials can confirm whether a registrant’s name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number align across multiple sources. That means fewer errors, fewer duplicate registrations, and fewer undeliverable mail ballots.

Voting rolls can be cleaned up:

Orange County, California, achieved similar success when it collaborated with Experian to verify voter addresses. Over eight years, officials identified more than 400,000 potential address conflicts and confirmed more than 74,000 move-aways, cleaning up the rolls and saving taxpayer money on wasted mailings.

And in West Virginia, a pilot project using Experian data revealed that a quarter of the sampled voter records were associated with outdated addresses. This is an early warning system that helped prevent errors before they became controversies.

The article concludes:

The fix is simple: make EAVS (Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey) participation mandatory. Congress should require every jurisdiction to provide full, verified responses, subject to quality control. This isn’t about partisanship, it’s about facts. Reliable data should not depend on who feels like filling out a spreadsheet.

It’s 2025. The idea that we’re still relying on postcards and voluntary surveys to maintain the foundation of American democracy is unacceptable. If we want elections that are secure, transparent, and worthy of confidence, we must use the best tools available. That means embracing commercial data and demanding honest reporting from every jurisdiction. Clean data means clean elections. It’s time to finish the fight and bring voter roll maintenance into the 21st century. It’s how we make elections easy to vote but hard to cheat.

Let’s bring back election integrity.