(The Lion) — An Illinois defense attorney is charging there are too many dead people on the state’s jury pools, a claim bolstered by ChatGPT.

If true, it not only has significance for criminal justice reform, but implications for election integrity.

The story is developing at the same time the Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued 29 states and Washington, D.C., for stonewalling federal voter roll audits.

A national survey of one third of the country’s voters yielded 350,000 dead registrants and 25,000 individuals with no citizenship records, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told Fox host Maria Bartiromo.

And that’s among the states showing high compliance with voter registration requirements.

James Mertes, a criminal defense attorney in Whiteside County, Illinois, said that dead people’s names are also turning up on recent lists of potential jurors.

Now, he and county prosecutors are questioning whether Illinois has sufficient safeguards to purge the deceased from its jury pools.

The case sits at an uncomfortable intersection of two issues that rarely share the same sentence: judicial fairness, a priority of the left, and election integrity, a priority of the right.

Both concerns trace back to the same corrupted state databases.

The issue surfaced in the case of Michael Cover, charged with felony aggravated battery of a police officer, reported local WHBF Davenport, Quad Cities News.

Mertes, representing Cover, 32, discovered that the county clerk was using a jury list that improperly excluded potential jurors.

The clerk was excluding anyone under 21, over 80, anyone who owed the county clerk money, anyone with a pending civil case and anyone ever charged with a criminal case in the county.

“The person doing the jury selection, that’s how she was taught,” Circuit Clerk Sue Scott told Quad Cities News. “So how long it’s been in place, I have no idea. Nor does she.”

A judge threw out the jury pool.

A second attempt with a blindfolded clerk drawing names randomly from a box used the same flawed underlying list, said the Chicago Tribune.

A judge tossed that list out too.

A new pool was generated using ChatGPT to randomly pull names from a state-provided list of 48,000 county residents.

Of 200 names produced, 60 were dead.

The average age of the remaining potential jurors was 72 with the youngest at 42, reported the Tribune.

The list raised immediate questions.

Whiteside County’s 2020 U.S. Census adult population was approximately 43,000.

That means the state’s list of 48,000 names was mathematically larger than present population.

Mertes argued the skewed pool – older, whiter and containing deceased individuals – violated both state and federal constitutions.

“It’s extremely difficult to believe this problem doesn’t exist in other counties,” he said, according to the Tribune. “Our system of justice is predicated on the idea that a jury represents a fair cross section of the community, so you get different perspectives.”

Illinois collects data from voter rolls, driver’s licenses and Social Security to create jury lists.

The case highlights the importance of centralized list integrity, since the same databases feeding Illinois jury pools also feed its voter rolls.

Under Illinois automatic voter registration, any interaction with a participating state agency triggers voter registration unless you opt out.

That includes the Secretary of State for driver’s licenses and state IDs, but also for public benefits.

Except for Social Security, none of the lists purges the dead or screens for citizenship.

Whiteside County State’s Attorney Colleen Buckwalter conceded the problems, stating in court that her office had received no guarantee that the pool had been purged of the deceased, noted the Tribune.

The Illinois State Board of Elections receives monthly death data from the U.S. Social Security Administration and the Illinois Department of Public Health but forwards it only to local election authorities.

“We don’t have authority to register or remove voters from voter rolls,” Board of Elections spokesperson Matt Dietrich said in an email to the Tribune. “That is solely the responsibility of local election authorities.”

The good news is if authorities move to clean up jury pool source lists, which is a straightforward 6th Amendment argument, the U.S. gets cleaner voter rolls as a byproduct.

Dhillon said the problem is nationwide, not just limited to Illinois.

“Just recently, someone was indicted in Minnesota, of all places, for voting without being a citizen, and so I’ve sent a document request to them on that,” the DOJ’s Dhillon told Fox. “Minnesota has a weird vouching law that allows citizens to vouch for each other’s citizenship.”