The Republican National Committee (RNC) has filed an election integrity lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, accusing her of undermining confidence in elections by failing to follow federal law on proper maintenance of voter rolls.
An analysis by the RNC shows that 76 of Michigan’s 83 counties have inflated voter rolls in violation of the NVRA.
“Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls, and that’s why the National Voter Registration Act requires state officials to keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date. Jocelyn Benson has failed to follow the NVRA, leaving Michigan with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.
The RNC also found that 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than voting-age U.S. citizens.
Further, 23 Michigan counties have active voter registration rates that meet or exceed 90 percent of adult citizens ages 18 and older. The RNC says that this figure “far eclipses” the voter registration rate nationwide in recent elections.
‘Voters Deserve Clean Voter Rolls’
In the lawsuit, the RNC and several individual RNC members who are lawfully registered to vote in Michigan accused Ms. Benson of failing to make a reasonable effort to conduct appropriate voter roll maintenance.They claimed that Ms. Benson’s alleged failures to follow the NVRA have caused them harm by “undermining their confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, discouraging their participation in the democratic process, and instilling in them the fear that their legitimate votes will be nullified or diluted by unlawful votes.”
Mr. Whatley said that the RNC is filing its lawsuit “because Michigan voters deserve clean voter rolls and confidence in their elections.”
The plaintiffs are asking the court to enter a judgment that Ms. Benson is violating Section 8 of the NRVA and issue a permanent injunction barring her from doing so any longer.
They’re also seeking an order requiring her to develop and implement “reasonable and effective” voter registration list-maintenance programs.
“In Michigan, we have done more in the last five years than was done in the previous two decades to remove deceased voters and ineligible citizens from our voting rolls and ensure their accuracy. Federal data shows Michigan is the fifth most active state in the nation in removing the registrations of voters who have died,” she wrote.
“Let’s call this what it is: a PR campaign masquerading as a meritless lawsuit filled with baseless accusations that seek to diminish people’s faith in the security of our elections,” she continued. “Shame on anyone who abuses the legal process to sow seeds of doubt in our democracy.”
The lawsuit comes after a recent leadership shakeup at the RNC, which saw Mr. Whatley become the chair and former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, take the post of co-chair.Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump have publicly said that a key focus of theirs will be election integrity.
‘Protecting the Vote’
Ronna McDaniel left her post as RNC chair on March 8. In her final speech as the head of the organization, she called on Republicans to unite around President Trump and his agenda, which she said includes reversing President Joe Biden’s “open borders” policies, getting tough on crime, and tackling inflation.Ms. McDaniel said she believes that Mr. Whatley will be “phenomenal” in the role and, in particular, on an issue that President Trump “cares deeply about, which is election integrity.”
President Trump said in mid-February that he’s convinced that Mr. Whatley, who served as general counsel for the North Carolina GOP in addition to being its chairman, will be “committed to election integrity, which we must have to keep fraud out of our election so it can’t be stolen.”
The former president maintains that he was cheated out of victory in the 2020 presidential election in part because of outright fraud and in part because of last-minute changes to election rules that sharply expanded opportunities to cast mail-in ballots, while softening voter verification requirements.
“One is we need to work with legislators and election regulators and officials to make sure the field is set and we know the rules, the laws, the regulations in all of these states are as clear as they need to be to be sure we will have transparent and fair elections,” he told the outlet before the RNC filed its 79th lawsuit on March 13.
“We’re doing that right now. We’ve already been involved in 78 lawsuits across the country that we have issued and responded to. We’re going to be engaged in more just to make sure the rules of the road in these states are rules we can all live with.
“Then, secondly, you have to be in the room.
“We’re going to recruit and train tens of thousands of volunteers across the country and hundreds and thousands of attorneys across the country to make sure we are in the room when the votes are being cast and the votes are being counted.”
Ms. Trump said in an interview on Fox News on March 10 that the RNC’s top priorities this election cycle focus on “protecting the vote.”
Besides making sure that only legally cast votes are counted, the RNC’s election integrity efforts are also meant to instill confidence in the integrity of elections, Ms. Trump said.
“We have to ensure that, when people go vote, they feel like their vote counts, that they are inspired to go vote,“ she said. ”We can never allow what happened in 2020 and the questions surrounding that election to ever happen again.”
