Democrats Slam RNC Slew of Anti-Voting Lawsuits, Urge Swift Dismissal in Court
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Democratic National Committee is pushing back against anti-voting claims in at least four lawsuits brought by the Republican National Committee against election officials.
In amicus briefs submitted in four cases — two in Michigan, one in Nevada and another in Mississippi — the Democratic National Committee (DNC) slammed what it described as a concerted campaign from national Republicans to impede the elections process ahead of 2024 by filing lawsuits filled with spurious claims.
The Democratic group called one of the lawsuits “an obvious collateral attack on election administration generally, intended to undermine confidence in elections and designed to sow doubt about the outcome of the 2024 presidential contest.”
Each of the four cases names the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a plaintiff, including two cases that challenge voter roll maintenance in Nevada and Michigan, respectively. Those lawsuits claim that both states have a number of counties in which there are more active registered voters than adults over the age of 18, and allege that the states’ failure to maintain accurate voter rolls violates Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a federal law that requires states to maintain accurate public voter rolls.
In its Nevada brief, Democrats call both cases “the latest efforts in the ongoing conservative attempt to use litigation to aggressively purge voter rolls.”
The DNC also took issue with the Nevada lawsuits’ use of voting-age population data from the American Community Survey (ACS) — an ongoing U.S. census survey — to back up the plaintiffs’ claims. The Democratic group accused the RNC of being “misleading” with the information and asserting that the data can’t be meaningfully compared to the current count of registered voters available from the Nevada secretary of state, the brief states.
“Their sloppy approach is consistent with an intent to prioritize casting doubt on the 2024 elections over bringing viable legal claims,” the DNC writes in its brief.
In another case out of Michigan, the RNC is suing over guidance issued to elections workers regarding the state’s absentee ballot signature verification system. The plaintiffs want the court to order Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s (D) office to rescind her instructions and prohibit her from implementing the “presumption of validity” — which essentially means that clerks presume that the signature is valid, but not without a review.
Under Michigan law, voters who wish to cast their ballot by mail must complete and sign applications for an absentee ballot. Local officials are tasked with verifying the voter’s identity by comparing the signature on the application with the voter’s signature on file before approving the request for an absentee ballot. Once the absentee ballot is cast, officials must then verify the voter’s signature on the return envelope using the same process.
The guidance is consistent with Michigan election law and the state constitution, the DNC argues, adding that if the RNC’s position was correct, Benson’s authority to issue election guidance “would essentially be limited to parroting back the text of the statutes—which would, of course, be of little help to local clerks attempting to conduct elections in a manner that is both consistent and lawful.”
Lastly, in Mississippi, the RNC, Mississippi Republican Party and a group of voters are challenging a state law that allows mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted if they’re received within five business days of the election.
The plaintiffs assert that only mail-in ballots received on or before Election Day can be legally counted — a claim that the DNC finds meritless.
“The federal statutes providing for the election to occur on election day require only that the voters’ choice of candidate occur by election day,” the DNC asserts. “Nothing in federal law prohibits states from counting votes received later so long as the final choice has occurred by election day. No conflict thus exists between federal law and Mississippi’s Ballot Receipt Deadline, and all of Plaintiffs’ claims fail for that reason.”