Michigan's top election official is reportedly facing a lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation last Nov. 3 over 25,000 dead people on the voter rolls.
Right Side Broadcasting Network said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is receiving another lawsuit but this time for 25,975 dead people in the state's voter roll.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has brought the names of the deceased voters last September to Benson's office yet nothing was done to correct it. Benson was approached by the Foundation because she is also the chief election officer of the state.
While Just The News explained that the 25,975 dead people on the voter list is the total of 24,645 active registrants and 1,330 inactive registrants that were regarded as "potentially deceased" as of August 5 based on the Social Security Death Index. This does not include the 334 "potentially dead registrants" whose names came up as "registered" after their death dates.
The Foundation further identified that of the said 25,975 "potentially deceased registrants", the 23,663 registrants was found to have been "dead for five years or more." There are 17,479 of these registrants have been dead for a minimum of ten years and 3,956 have been dead for a minimum of twenty years.
The Foundation is in charge of ensuring that the state's voter rolls only contain eligible registrants. It regularly communicates with the state's election officials regarding any problems it detects in the "list maintenance practices" and suggests the solution to these.
It then provides information to educate the public both in Michigan and across the country based on their analysis on the voter rolls, especially in line with the integrity of the election conducted at both state and national levels.
Accordingly, the Foundation filed the lawsuit because it has incurred additional costs in analyzing Michigan's voter rolls due to the inaccurate maintenance of its records. The lawsuit particularly calls for "declaratory and injunctive relief" for the violations of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act's Section 8.
"Because Defendant does not maintain accurate voter rolls, the Foundation must spend more time and resources evaluating Michigan's rolls and attempting to correct the problems. The Foundation has spent many thousands of dollars reviewing Michigan's election procedures and documented failures to maintain an accurate and correct voter roll as required by the NVRA," the lawsuit read.
"Defendant's unlawful list maintenance program has forced the Foundation to incur substantial costs comparing Michigan's voter rolls to the Social Security Death Index, various commercial databases, and other sources in order to identify deceased registrants," it added.
The Foundation pointed out that due to Benson's violations of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, they were not able to do their role of "protecting the integrity of the electoral process" not only in Michigan but also in other states forcing them to use funds that were supposed to be used for the latter.
"Defendant's violations of the NVRA have harmed and continue to harm and frustrate the Foundation's purpose of protecting the integrity of the electoral process, ensuring that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained, and educating the public about the same," the Public Interest Legal Foundation pointed out.
"The Foundation's expenditure of significant time and money in Michigan seeking to rectify Defendant's failure to clean up the voter rolls by removing the surfeit of deceased registrants from such rolls has also forced the Foundation to divert its limited resources from other states with similar issues. All of these harms confer standing upon the Foundation to assert the claim raised in this case," they stressed.
