California has removed 3.2 million inactive voters ahead of the 2025 Statewide Special Election, the office of California Secretary of State Shirley Weber confirmed to The Epoch Times in a recent email.

The 3,177,057 registration records were removed between 2022 and 2024, according to data provided by the office’s elections division. Ahead of the special election on Nov. 4, “election officials will continue to perform list maintenance activities in accordance with state and federal law,” the office stated.

Inactive voters are people who have moved outside their original county, according to the California Code of Regulations. In addition, voters who do not vote in two consecutive federal general elections are subject to having their voter registration canceled.

On the county level, data show that Los Angeles County had the most inactive voters removed: 773,774. It was followed by San Diego County with 369,149 inactive voters removed and Santa Clara County with 286,401 inactive voters removed.

Across California’s 58 counties, local registrars’ offices have reported that the majority of canceled registration records are because voters have moved away, failed to vote or respond to election-related notices, or died.

Between 2022 and 2024, California also processed about 4.3 million new valid voter registrations.

As of Feb. 10, 2025, the Golden State had 22.9 million registered voters. This number was a slight increase from 2024, when the state reported 22.6 million registered voters. There were 21.9 million registered voters reported in 2022.

Shiloh Marx, founder of the California Election Integrity Initiative, told The Epoch Times that cleaning and maintaining the voter rolls ensures trust in the election process, allows local governments to rebuild trust with their constituents, and cuts down on unnecessary spending.

“If anything, we’ll save on tax dollars, because we won’t be having to send so many confirmation notices out,” Marx said. “Everybody stands to gain—Democrats, Republicans, independents.”

The state still had about 2.8 million inactive voters pending removal across all counties by the end of 2024, according to data from the secretary of state’s office. However, that number dropped to 2.3 million as of September 2025.

This puts California’s current inactive voter total at 10.1 percent of all registrations, compared with the national average of 10.6 percent—the first time that the state has dropped below the national average since at least 1996. The state peaked in 2012, when inactive voters made up 28.7 percent of the state’s total registrations.

Grassroots Effort Urges Continued Maintenance

“It was, I’d say, early January, after I did a lot of research, [when] I just noticed how horrible California’s voter rolls were,” Marx said. “I talked to a few people and threw around the idea of going, ‘Hey, what if we tried to clean the rolls?’”

His grassroots-led initiative, launched in January, is now leading the push for voter roll maintenance and has been filing public records requests with each of the state’s counties and the secretary of state.

“This is something that I’m very excited to share,” said Marx, who is currently working alone. “There’s constant records requests; there’s constant reaching out to counties.”

The San Diego County resident said he had previously worked on a separate initiative before the 2024 elections, for which he had the opportunity to do legal research. Marx is not a lawyer, but his work is built on publicly available data, federal laws that allow private citizens to bring litigation to enforce election laws, and access to public officials working in local registrars’ offices.

“I reach out to a county, [and] I ask a series of questions ... which mostly are applicable to federal law—California state law also,” he said.

Marx said he asks for the number of current active and inactive voters, as well as registrations continuously on a county’s inactive file after showing no voting activity for two or more federal elections.

“If they’ve given me the records and they’re not removing them, that’s where I then go to the secretary of state,” he said.

Under federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 established certain registration requirements, including standards for voter roll maintenance and enforcement. The law prevents states from removing a voter simply for failing to vote in one election, establishing the “inactive voter list.”

It also requires each state to “designate a State officer or employee as the chief State election official,” which is typically the secretary of state, to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act. The law allows the U.S. Justice Department and private parties to file lawsuits against states that fail to comply.

Under California law, county elections officials are tasked with determining voters’ eligibility and updating their information.

“I’m simply ... badgering them online to do their job, and I have no means necessarily to require them [to do so],” Marx said. “I’m just basically shining the light on it, and then if the counties don’t want to give records, that’s when there’s legal action.”

He said it is “really up to the secretary of state and the counties” to remove inactive or ineligible voter registrations.

“[The] overwhelming majority of California counties are doing an incredible job,” Marx said.

Only a handful, he said, are “not doing their job” of cleaning their records according to state and federal law, or have been less cooperative when he sends a public records request for voter registration data.

San Bernardino, Fresno, San Luis Obispo, and Alameda counties provided the number of inactive voters on their rolls but did not mention removal, according to Marx.

He said that San Francisco, Riverside, Stanislaus, San Bernardino, and Orange counties gave him incomplete data.

“Californians are the ones who are standing to gain from the inactives being removed,” Marx said. “We the people, the taxpayers, the everyday amazing Americans.”

Counties Respond

After reaching out to the counties that Marx mentioned to confirm how many inactive voters are in their files and how frequently they clean their voter rolls, The Epoch Times heard back from two counties.

“Between 2020 and 2022 the Department canceled 12,657 records of voters with inactive histories through two federal general elections,“ San Francisco County stated in an email. ”Since the November 2025 election is not a federal general election the canceling of inactive records according to law is inapplicable.”

The registrar’s office stated that the elections department changed its process of canceling inactive records in 2018 and does not have readily available records.

Orange County wrote, “The Registrar of Voters cancelled 176,591 inactive voters earlier this year, because they became inactive before the 2022 General Election and did not respond to the notices or vote by the 2024 General Election.”

The registrar’s office stated that it will continue to maintain its rolls throughout the Nov. 4, 2025, Statewide Special Election, in which Californians will vote on redistricting congressional maps.

According to public records requests that Marx posted on X, some counties have very few inactive voters on their rolls. Approximately 2.4 percent of voters on Santa Clara County’s rolls are inactive.

San Diego County, which removed approximately 110,000 inactive voters following the November 2024 general election, stated in an email: “The inactive voter list serves as a safety net for people who may have moved within the state or county and are otherwise eligible to vote. ... Voter file maintenance is a continuous process, even ahead of elections.”