Conservative groups are systematically trying to question the legitimacy of large numbers of voter registrations across the country ahead of the presidential election.
The strategy is part of a broader effort to raise questions about the integrity of this year’s election, as former President Donald Trump repeatedly claims without evidence that his opponents are trying to cheat.
Voter roll tactics include massive door-to-door campaigns, using special software to identify voters whose eligibility can be challenged and a flood of lawsuitsSome of these were brought by the Republican National Committee, which is hosting the GOP national convention next week.
Several Republican secretaries of state are combing through voter rolls independentalso in Ohio and Tennessee, or to comply with aggressive new state voting laws.
Those behind the reviews see them as good government efforts aimed at helping local election offices clean up the rolls. Voting rights groups and Democrats believe the effort is aimed at undermining confidence in the results of the 2024 election and laying the legal groundwork to challenge the results.
Below you can see what is happening around the challenges surrounding the voter lists:
Michigan’s “Soles to the Rolls,” named after the “Souls to the Polls” campaign of black churches to get people out to the polls, and Nevada’s Pigpen Project are among the state-level initiatives where volunteers try to find errors in the state’s voter rolls.
Their findings can sound ominous: dead or non-U.S. citizens registered, or people registered at addresses they no longer live in, suggesting the possibility of double voting. Conservative activists identify the suspicious records and then deliver them to local or state election offices for possible expungement.
Earlier this year, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, ordered an official in a Detroit suburb to restore the registrations of about 1,000 people who had been purged in such a move after The New York Times reported on the purge.
Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said information from member states suggests the effort is happening nationwide. She said many of the challenges are ignoring or misunderstanding the complexities and legal requirements surrounding voter roll maintenance.
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 registration doesn’t mean election officials aren’t aware of it, Cohen said.
“Voter registration rolls are living, breathing databases,” she said. “That’s part of the challenge, because people move and die and change their names and just exist every day, and when you get a list, you buy a moment in time. Registration activities and voter registration roll maintenance activities are ongoing.”
Conservative groups behind the voter roll overhaul have filed hundreds of public records requests across the country. access voter files. In nearly a quarter of states, the disputes have ended up in court. One of their goals is to create public databases where anyone can search and ask questions about whether certain voters should be allowed on a state’s rolls.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, led by conservative lawyers Cleta Mitchellis behind challenges in Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Mitchell is perhaps best known for his participation in Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” the votes he needed to win the state in 2020. Arizona, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania are facing lawsuits from other groups.
In Georgia there is a Associated Press Survey A survey of the state’s 40 largest counties found that more than 18,000 voters were required to cast ballots in the past two years, even though local election officials turned most of them away.
Many volunteer groups have been encouraged to search the voter rolls during workshops led by the CEO of MyPillow Mike Lindella Trump ally and a leading voice promoting election conspiracy theories. They also sometimes use tools like EagleAI Network, a data-matching software program developed for Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network that creates voter rolls from change-of-address forms, criminal records and property tax data.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation also sued the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voluntary system in which states share data to maintain accurate voter rolls. The lawsuit sought access to information that member states 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 Division, said no eligible voters have been removed from the rolls as a result of his group’s efforts. He called the movement’s critics paranoid.
“I don’t care about fraud,” he said. “Accuracy is what I care about.” He said accurate voter rolls are especially important in states that send ballots to every registration on their rolls.
At least nine Republican-led states have left the voluntary network, known as ERIC, after it became entangled in election conspiracy theoriesreducing the ability to verify voter data across state lines. Supporters of the system noted the paradox of Republican states leaving because the the only national system which helps states identify voters who are ineligible to vote.
The Republican National Committee, reconstituted under Trumpis also involved in efforts to challenge voter lists before the November elections.
Michigan’s voter rolls have been targeted by numerous lawsuits over the past four years by the RNC and others. A lawsuit filed in March by the RNC in Nevada alleges that the state is violating the National Voter Registration Act by failing to keep voter registration data accurate and up to date. RNC Chairman Michael Whatley at the time cited the need for “clean voter rolls.”
Federal law, experts say, actually favors voters’ right to vote. To prevent eligible voters from being disenrolled, outdated records must remain in the system for several years after they’ve been flagged as potential problems. It’s a formality that could explain questions often raised by conservative groups, such as the number of voter registrations exceeding a jurisdiction’s population.
It’s like “comparing apples to orangutans,” Nevada’s Democratic attorney general said as he criticized the data the RNC cited in its analysis. In its summary, the Democratic National Committee portrayed the RNC’s lawsuits as building blocks for a 2024 election challenge.
“This lawsuit is little more than political theater, designed less to address a real (let alone substantial) problem with Nevada’s voter registration rolls than to sow public distrust in the security and integrity of our election systems,” the filing reads. “It is nothing more than a continuation of Republicans’ 2020 efforts to undermine public confidence in our elections.”
Trump ally Ken Blackwell, who directs campaign efforts at the America First Policy Institute, has said that legitimate voters “risk having their hard-won right to vote diluted by ballots cast improperly” if solutions are not found to the problems with the voter rolls.
However, election law experts say the problem such efforts seek to solve — ineligible voters casting ballots — remains exceptionally rare.
“Why? Because it makes sense that one person voting when they’re not eligible is not going to influence the election and expose themselves to criminal sanctions,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “So even if someone were inclined to do that, it’s very high risk and very low reward.”
Clapman said that the disinformation about voter lists undermines confidence in election officials, who already being confronted with pressure and threatsand undermines confidence in the ‘proud civic activity’ of voting.
“What’s so insidious about it is that voting used to be a unifying national activity,” she said. “It’s now become an object of suspicion, and that’s really corrosive to our democracy.”