Federal Judge Dismisses RNC Lawsuit Aimed at Purging Michigan Voters
A federal judge today tossed out the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) lawsuit seeking to gain access to Michigan’s voter roll maintenance records in order to purge allegedly “ineligible” registrants.
In a complaint filed in March, the RNC maintained that Michigan’s top election officials are failing to properly maintain “clean and accurate voter registration records” in violation of a federal law known as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
The lawsuit claimed at least 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than adults over the age of 18 and an additional 23 counties have active voter registration rates that exceed 90% of adults over 18 — numbers that the committee deemed “impossibly high” and “inflated.”
However, in today’s ruling, Judge Jane M. Beckering held that the plaintiffs — including both the RNC and individual voters — lacked standing. Moreover, Beckering, a Biden appointee, concluded that Michigan has an adequate process for removing deceased and other ineligible individuals from the state’s voter rolls.
According to the Michigan Department of State, more than 800,000 voter registrations have been canceled since 2019 through March 2024.
Beckering’s Tuesday order also said that even if the GOP plaintiffs did have standing, their largely speculative claims should be rejected since they fail to prove that Michigan violated the NVRA or show “more than a mere possibility of misconduct.”
In court filings, the defendants — including Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) — pointed out that the RNC failed to identify a single voter who is ineligible but nonetheless remains on the state’s active voter list.
State officials further argued the RNC based its allegations of inflated voter registrations on a flawed methodology. In particular, the plaintiffs compared census survey data to the total number of voter registrations in Michigan’s database — as opposed to the total number of active voter registrants.
This faulty process, in turn led the RNC “to conclude that there are more registered voters than the voting-age population in [certain] counties,” the state defendants noted.
Earlier this year, Beckering rejected a strikingly similar case brought by the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) that mounted claims concerning Michigan’s voter list maintenance program. That lawsuit is now on appeal in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The RNC’s legal challenge to Michigan’s voter rolls came on the heels of a swift leadership overhaul at the committee last spring by a contingent of close Trump allies, with former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over as co-chairs.
In line with its avowedly more offensive “election integrity” strategy, the RNC’s Michigan lawsuit asserted the state’s purported failure to maintain accurate voter lists “undermines the integrity of elections by increasing the opportunity for ineligible voters or voters intent on fraud to cast ballots.”
Citing scant evidence, the complaint went so far as to proclaim that “[v]oter fraud is very real in Michigan. Several recent elections have suffered from voter fraud.”
In a “friend of the court” brief refuting the RNC’s claims, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) characterized the challenge as the “latest in a series of meritless lawsuits filed by Republican candidates over the last several years alleging voter fraud or other election impropriety, which serve only to undermine faith in our electoral systems.”
The DNC added that the RNC’s requested relief, if granted, would have threatened to unlawfully disenfranchise Michigan voters. Other voting rights groups that sought to intervene the case — including the League of Women Voters of Michigan, Detroit Disability Power and the Michigan Alliance for Retired Americans — expressed similar concerns about the dangers of the RNC’s request to purge large swaths of voters on the eve of the 2024 presidential election.
The RNC previously lost a similar voter roll challenge in Nevada, but is currently litigating another case alongside the Trump campaign alleging that the state is failing to keep noncitizens off of its voter rolls. PILF is also involved in a Nevada lawsuit seeking to purge voters in Washoe County.
Democracy Docket is tracking nearly two dozen active lawsuits across 13 states targeting voter rolls — an issue that has proven to be a central focus of Republicans’ legal strategy throughout the 2024 election cycle.