Even if these numbers are assumed to be accurate

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Even if these numbers are assumed to be accurate, presenting them as definitively demonstrating that “some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America’s adult citizens” is a questionable and problematic claim, given that the information was compiled from only 462 counties in 38 states, yet the entire U.S. comprises over 3,000 counties in fifty states. Many of those other counties might well have substantially fewer registered voters on their rolls than adult residents who are eligible to vote.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-more-reg...an-adults/

Another major issue with such a claim is the potential inclusion of “inactive” voters among the tallies of registered voters, a matter that was publicized in a 1 August 2017 letter Judicial Watch sent to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla threatening to sue unless the state and eleven of its counties produced voter records to them. According to Judicial Watch, their own analysis of U.S. Census data and voter registration records indicated those eleven counties included numbers of registered voters exceeding the numbers of adults eligible to vote in those counties.


In December 2017, Judicial Watch made good on their threat, initiating litigation that is currently in progress in U.S. District Court, Central District of California. The lawsuit accuses California and multiple jurisdictions of violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) by failing to maintain updated voter registration rolls.

Stories based on Judicial Watch’s letter initially made Internet waves in late summer 2017 via right-leaning blogs and Kremlin propaganda networks. In April 2018, another version of the claim went viral in the form of an editorial published months ago by the financial publication Investors Business Daily:


The trope that upwards of 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election is so persistent that it resulted in a now-defunct voter fraud commission, which was quietly disbanded in January 2018 without presenting any evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The California Secretary of State’s office confirmed to us directly that “the only way for inactive voters to obtain a ballot is for them to request a ballot in person at either a county elections office or at a polling location.”

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told us efforts such as the one undertaken by Judicial Watch and a similar one undertaken by another non-profit, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), are not meant to strengthen election systems but rather to bully election officials into purging voter rolls, in contrast to both the spirit and letter of federal election laws.

Often, she said, such figures produced by the likes of Judicial Watch and PILF fail to account for things such as active military members or students attending university away from their home jurisdictions that may affect figures and numbers in different ways:

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