On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, challenging the state’s process for canceling the voter registration for dead individuals.
The suit was filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm which has filed suits in several states aimed at pushing election officials to aggressively purge their voter rolls. The group has previously made false claims about voter fraud in the U.S.
In its suit against the Michigan Department of State, the group argued that the state does not properly maintain its voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, allowing thousands of deceased voters to remain on file. However, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the suit, noting “the record demonstrates that deceased voters are removed from Michigan’s voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis.”
The decision was upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, prior to the group’s appeal to the Supreme Court.
“Michigan is one of the most active states in the nation when it comes to keeping our voter file up to date and cancelling the registrations of people who have died,” Benson said in a statement. “The claims in this lawsuit were not supported by evidence; they were partisan attacks aimed at undermining people’s faith in our secure elections. I’m glad to see the Supreme Court acknowledge that the facts and the law still matter and stand with the lower courts that have praised Michigan’s comprehensive work to maintain accurate voter rolls.”
The Department of State has removed more than 1.4 million registrations from the state’s qualified voter file in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act since 2019. It emphasized that clerks receive information from the Social Security Death Index on a daily basis and can use information like obituaries or death notifications from the voter’s family to remove them from the file.
In an email to the Michigan Advance, Logan Churchwell, the group’s research director, simply said “We’re disappointed.”
Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.
