Conservative groups are pushing to clean up the voter rolls. Others see an effort to sow electoral distrust

Conservative groups systematically attempt to challenge the legitimacy of large numbers of voter registrations across the country ahead of the presidential election.

The strategy is part of a broader effort that raises questions about the integrity of this year’s elections, as former President Donald Trump has stated. repeatedly states no evidence that your opponents are trying to cheat.

Voter roll tactics include mass doorstep campaigns using special software designed to identify voters whose eligibility may be challenged and a multitude of lawsuits. Some of them were brought by the Republican National Committee, which will host the Republican Party’s national convention next week.

Several Republican secretaries of state are combing voter rolls because of themincluding in Ohio and Tennessee, or to comply aggressive new state election laws.

Those behind the revisions see them as good government efforts aimed at helping local election offices clean up the rolls. Voting rights groups and Democrats believe the effort aims to shake faith in the 2024 election results and lay the legal groundwork to contest the results.

Here’s a look at what’s happening around voter roll challenges:

States must now maintain their lists

“Soles to the Rolls” in Michigan, whose name echoes the black churches’ “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote efforts, and Nevada’s Pigpen Project are among state-level initiatives in which volunteers are trying to find holes in voter rolls. state voters.

Their findings may seem ominous: dead people or registered non-U.S. citizens, or people listed at addresses where they no longer live, suggesting the potential for double voting. Conservative activists identify suspicious registrations and then turn them over to local or state election offices for possible removal.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, earlier this year told a suburban Detroit official to reinstate the records of about 1,000 people who had been removed through such an effort, after the purge was reported by the The New York Times.

Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said information from member states suggests efforts are happening across the country. She said many of the challenges ignore or misinterpret the complexity and legal requirements relating to maintaining electoral rolls.

The National Voter Registration Act already requires states to take steps to maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration lists. Just because someone finds an outdated record doesn’t mean election officials aren’t aware of it, Cohen said.

“Voter registration lists are living, breathing databases,” she said. “That’s part of the challenge, because people move, die, change their name and just exist every day, and when you get a list, you’re buying a moment in time. Registration and maintenance of voter registration lists are ongoing.”

The fight for voter data

Conservative groups behind voter roll revisions have filed hundreds of public records requests across the country to have access to voter files. In nearly a quarter of states, disputes have reached the courts. One of its goals is to create public databases for anyone to search and question whether certain voters should be allowed on a state’s rolls.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, is behind challenges in Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Mitchell is perhaps best known for participating in Trump’s call asking Georgia Secretary of State to “find” the votes he needed to win the state in 2020. Arizona, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania face lawsuits from other groups.

In Georgia, a Associated Press poll of the state’s 40 largest counties found that more than 18,000 voters were challenged over the past two years, even though local election offices rejected most of them.

Many of the volunteer groups were encouraged to explore voter lists in workshops led by the CEO of MyPillow Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and a leading voice in promoting election conspiracy theories. They also sometimes employ tools like EagleAI Network, a data-matching software program developed for the Mitchell Election Integrity Network that creates voter lists from change-of-address forms, criminal justice records, and tax data. about property.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation also sued the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voluntary system in which states share data to maintain accurate voter lists. Their legal action sought access to information that member states had agreed to keep private when they joined.

The foundation’s president and general counsel, J. Christian Adams, who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Voting Bureau, said not a single eligible voter was removed from the rolls as a result of his group’s efforts. He called critics of the movement paranoid.

“Fraud, I don’t care,” he said. “Accuracy is what matters to me.” He said accurate voter lists are especially important in states that send ballots to everyone on their lists.

At least nine Republican-led states have abandoned the voluntary network, known as ERIC, after it became involved in electoral conspiracy theories, weakening its ability to verify voter registrations across states. Defenders of the system noted the paradox of Republican states leaving because it is the only national system which helps states identify voters who are ineligible to vote.

Cleaning the rollers or sowing distrust?

The Republican National Committee, recently reconstituted under Trumpis also involved in efforts to challenge voter lists before the November elections.

Michigan’s voter rolls were targeted numerous lawsuits over the past four years by the RNC and others. A Nevada lawsuit filed by the RNC in March alleges that the state is violating the National Voter Registration Act by failing to keep voter records accurate and up-to-date. At the time, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley cited the need for “clean voter rolls.”

Experts say federal law actually errs in granting voters rights. To prevent eligible voters from being canceled, outdated records must remain in the system for a few years after they are flagged as a potential concern. It’s a technicality that can explain issues often raised by conservative groups, such as the number of voter registrations exceeding the population of a jurisdiction.

It’s like “comparing apples to orangutans,” said Nevada’s Democratic attorney general, criticizing the data cited by the RNC in its analysis. In its report, the Democratic National Committee called the RNC’s lawsuits ammunition for a 2024 election challenge.

“This lawsuit is little more than political theater, designed less to address any real (much less substantial) problem with Nevada’s voter registration rolls than to sow public distrust in the security and integrity of our election systems,” the document stated. is nothing more than a continuation of Republican efforts in 2020 to undermine public confidence in our elections.”

Casting suspicion on the vote

Trump ally Ken Blackwell, who leads election efforts at the America First Policy Institute, said legitimate voters “risk having their hard-won right to vote diluted by illegally cast votes” if flaws in voter rolls are not made. are resolved.

However, election law experts say the problem such efforts aim to solve — ineligible voters casting ballots — remains exceptionally rare.

“Why? Because it is common sense that a person who votes when he is not eligible will not influence an election and will expose himself to criminal sanctions,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “So , even if someone were inclined to do this, it would be very high risk and very low reward.”

Clapman said that misinformation surrounding electoral rolls is undermining trust in election officials, who already face pressures and threatsand it is undermining faith in the “proud civic activity” of voting.

“What’s so insidious about this is that voting used to be a unifying national activity,” she said. “Now it has become an object of suspicion and that is really corrosive to our democracy.”