A civil rights watchdog group has sued the state's highest election officer for allegedly colluding with YouTube to censor its election integrity video.
Judicial Watch claims that Shirley Weber, in her official capacity as California's Secretary of State in the Western Division of the Central District of California, tagged a Judicial Watch video as misleading, which led it to being removed from YouTube.
"We figured it out because our intrepid lawyers and investigators extracted documents from the Secretary of State's office documenting this massive program that was done in league with the then Biden campaign's PR operation to target American citizens who were saying 'the wrong thing on elections' leading to outrageous censorship," said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.
According to records obtained by Judicial Watch in response to a Dec. 30, 2020 California Public Records Act request, the California Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC) listed the video on its Misinformation Tracking Sheet or Misinformation Tracker. Weber oversees the OEC.
"We're suing a government entity directly over their collusion with big tech, specifically Google/YouTube," Fitton added.
The 26-minute video, titled ELECTION INTEGRITY CRISIS: Dirty Voter Rolls, Ballot Harvesting & Mail-in-Voting Risks! featured Fitton discussing the vote-by-mail processes, changes to states’ election procedures, ballot collection, also known as ballot harvesting, and the states’ failures to clean up its voter rolls.
The video, posted on Sept. 22, 2020, has not been available on YouTube since Sept. 25, 2020, according to a press release.
"It is not the role of the state to police the opinion of citizens, yet the Secretary of State's office did that just that when she monitored Judicial Watch's YouTube channel," wrote Judicial Watch attorney Robert Patrick Sticht in the Sept. 23 lawsuit.
The complaint also states that Fitton’s comments were not misinformation because they were founded upon successful lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch against Los Angeles County and Weber in 2017 to compel the county and state to comply with the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) voter list maintenance requirements.
For example, in June 2019, Judicial Watch was informed that Los Angeles County had sent notices to 1.6 million inactive voters on its voter rolls after a settlement agreement had been reached. Prior to the California settlement agreement, Judicial Watch estimated that national census data and voter-roll information showed that there were 3.5 million more names on various county voter rolls nationwide than there were citizens of voting age.