RNC Sues Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson Over Voter Roll Maintenance

On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a federal lawsuit upholding a previous demand that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson should take steps to purge voter rolls of what it previously described as an unusually high number of registered voters.

The move comes just days after Trump supporters effectively took control of the RNC before the 2024 election.

RNC Sues Benson

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - FEBRUARY 05: Jocelyn Benson at the SiriusXM Business Radio Broadcasts "Beyond The Game: Tackling Race" From Wharton San Francisco on February 5, 2016 in San Francisco, California.
(Photo : Kimberly White/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

The lawsuit filed in federal court said that Michigan had violated the National Voter Registration Act's requirement to maintain clean and accurate vote registration rolls.

It noted that at least 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than adult citizens over 18, and that number of voters is impossibly high. The lawsuit added that 23 counties have active-voter registration rates exceeding 90 percent of adult citizens over 18, and that figure far eclipses recent elections' national and statewide voter registration rates.

The goal of the American voter roll system is registration, not removal. Since most voters do not remove themselves from the system when they move, outdated registration is frequently included in the rolls.

Federal law protects voters from aggressive purges by mandating that authorities wait years before removing a voter who has ceased to cast ballots, even while it still requires officials to take action to keep the lists current.

However, there is no evidence that inflated rolls cause voter fraud despite Republicans using the voter rolls as a focus of their election activism.

Benson told NBC News that election officials in the state 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."

She said over 700,000 voters have been removed from the voter rolls, and another half million will be removed if they do not vote in this year's general election.

Furthermore, she added that she calls it 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 claimed shame on anyone who abuses the legal process to sow seeds of doubt in their democracy.

Republican, Conservative Activists Doubt Voters' Eligibility

Since the 2020 election, some Republican activists have started challenging thousands of voters' eligibility, and they have developed computer software that they think will assist them in uncovering fraud.

Conservative activists have also recently taken advantage of a well-known voter roll maintenance initiative called ERIC (the Electronic Registration Information Center). This interstate, nonpartisan collaboration facilitates data sharing between states to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

Nine GOP-led states withdrew from the program as conspiracy theories about ERIC gained traction, taking their data with them and weakening the coalition's effectiveness.

The RNC suit in Michigan, a key battleground state, raises the possibility that voter rolls will play a bigger role in the GOP's election law approach.