An election integrity group is filing a new legal complaint each day this week regarding a different Minnesota county for officials’ failure to remove duplicate voter registrations from county voter rolls.
“Federal law requires that duplicate registrations are eliminated from the voter roll,” said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). Adams is a former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.
“It is troubling that we are seeing duplicate registrants remain on the voter roll in Minnesota counties. Each duplicate registration allows for a person to vote more than once. Removing these duplicate registrations will make Minnesota’s elections more secure.”
PILF describes itself as “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity.” The nonprofit organization “exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity, and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”
Under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states are required to implement a computerized statewide voter registration list that is accurate and eliminates duplicate registrations.
PILF is now using state implementation provisions in HAVA that have “pretty much never been used for 20 years,” Adams told The Epoch Times in an interview.
Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a handful of states were exempted from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), also known as the Motor Voter Law because it allowed people to register to vote with relative ease at motor vehicle agencies and government offices. NVRA requires states to make a reasonable effort to remove ineligible individuals’ names from voter rolls.
It has been difficult to get Minnesota to clean up its voter rolls because the state couldn’t be forced to do it under NVRA, Adams said.
But then legal counsel discovered that HAVA contained a provision allowing states to pass rules about how to implement that law. Some states didn’t do anything about it, but Minnesota solved the problem with a state law that allowed lawsuits to be filed over failure to comply with HAVA, Adams said.
“So that’s what we’re doing. We’ve found all kinds of duplicate registrations, a convicted sex offender, who seems to have voted twice in 2020, according to the records,” Adams said.
“Nothing has happened in Minnesota for so many decades, because nobody thought there was a tool to do it. And we found a broom. And we’re doing it,” Adams said.
On Sept. 27, PILF filed a complaint regarding Dakota County with the Minnesota secretary of state’s office.
According to the group, government records show there are 73 people on Dakota County’s voter roll that appear to have two voter registration numbers, despite having the same year of birth and address.
On Sept. 26, PILF filed a complaint regarding Nicollet County.
Government records indicate that there are four people on the county’s voter roll that have two voter registration numbers, despite having the same year of birth and address.
“One of these apparent duplicate registrants, Damian Kingbird, voted twice in the 2020 election, though only the Minnesota police can determine if an election crime did occur,” PILF said in a summary.
“Alarmingly, Kingbird is a convicted criminal and has been committed as mentally ill and dangerous. Records show he has been found guilty of crimes, including making terrorist threats, sexual assault, and even sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl.”
Adams said that “duplicate registrations give people the opportunity to vote twice.”
“It is alarming that a career criminal like Damian Kingbird had the ability to vote twice in the 2020 election. He only had that opportunity because Minnesota election officials were not removing duplicate registrations as required by federal law.”
A recent report by PILF found that more than 2,000 registrants on New Jersey’s voter rolls were identified as 105 years or older. PILF has also uncovered numerous examples of dead people being included in voter rolls in various states.
Officials in Dakota County and Nicollet County didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
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