United Sovereign Americans Lawsuit Targets Texas Voter Rolls, Asks Court to Block Election Certification
The right-wing group United Sovereign Americans (USA) filed a new lawsuit in Texas, alleging grave irregularities in the state’s procedures related to voter rolls and its overall voting system.
According to the lawsuit, filed on Aug. 27, Texas violated the National Voter Registration Act because it failed to remove ineligible voters from its voter rolls. USA claims that, in the 2022 election, Texas allegedly had 196,658 voting violations and more than 1.3 million errors on the state’s voter rolls. That rate of error, the lawsuit claims, is in violation of the Help America Vote Act, which allows approximately one error in every 125,000 votes.
In their lawsuit, USA is asking a Texas court to compel the state to adopt new voter registration procedures, and order the state to submit voter registration requests to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to verify individuals’ citizenship status. The lawsuit also asks the court to block Texas from certifying the upcoming general election until the defendants — Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson (R), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland — can demonstrate the election was lawfully conducted.
The lawsuit is nearly identical to four other lawsuits USA filed this year — in Florida, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The group’s latest Texas lawsuit is significant because it was filed in the Northern District of Texas, which is favored by right-wing plaintiffs as they’re more likely to get a favorable ruling.
Original post, Aug. 21:
United Sovereign Americans (USA), the new right-wing group behind a concerted effort to remove voters from voting rolls across the country, filed a lawsuit targeting Florida’s voter rolls — the second such lawsuit the group filed this month.
In the Florida lawsuit filed on Aug. 19, USA — along with a host of co-plaintiffs including the right-wing Citizens Defending Freedom, a voter and eight Republican candidates running in the upcoming general election — allege the state is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and state law by failing to remove ineligible voters from its voter rolls.
The group claims to have obtained information proving there were “more than sixty-three (63) voting system errors in the entire ballot tabulation for all ballots cast in the 2022 election in Florida” that led to “hundreds of thousands of potential errors” in the 2022 general election.
The errors USA outlines in the lawsuit are related to the state’s voter registration rolls. The complaint alleges there were a mass number of illegal votes cast because of duplicate voter registrations, inactive status and a host of other reasons. The lawsuit also argues the state is violating the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) because it exceeds the acceptable federal error rate in a state’s voter systems — one error in every 125,00 votes.
USA’s Ohio lawsuit, filed Aug. 8, makes similar allegations, claiming there were more than 34 voting system errors in the counting of ballots in the state’s 2022 general election. Because of those errors, the lawsuit alleges the state’s voter rolls “contained more than one (1) million potential” illegal voter registrations in the 2022 election, which they argue “compromise the validity of Ohio’s elections, cast doubt upon the accuracy and integrity of Ohio’s currently-in-place voting systems, and undermine Ohioans collective voting rights, all in violation of federal and state election laws.”
With these latest lawsuits, USA has now sued four states this year in an attempt to have millions of eligible voters removed from voter rolls. In March, the group filed a lawsuit in Maryland challenging the state’s procedures related to voter rolls and its voting system. A federal judge dismissed the group’s lawsuit in May, but they quickly appealed the ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where litigation is ongoing. In June, the group filed a similar lawsuit in Pennsylvania.
These lawsuits targeting how states maintain accurate voter rolls is a part of USA’s broader strategy to have voters removed from voter rolls and sow doubt in federal election processes. The group also recruits volunteers from across the country and trains them to confront their election officials on how they administer elections.