The United States Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a challenge to how Michigan maintains its voter rolls, and in particular, how the state removes people who have died from its list of eligible voters.
In an unsigned order, the high court let stand two lower-court decisions that dismissed a lawsuit filed by the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation claiming Michigan was violating the National Voter Registration Act by having almost 26,000 deceased voters still on the state's lists of qualified voters.
The 2021 suit said Michigan's failure to update its voter rolls was harming "the integrity of the electoral process."
The lawsuit was one of several filed by conservative legal groups seeking to call into question how elections are conducted, and who is eligible to vote, in battleground states.
The Michigan case centered on the National Voter Registration Act's requirement that states make "a reasonable effort to remove ineligible persons from the voter rolls." The Public Interest Legal Foundation argued Michigan was not meeting that standard.
"Michigan has failed to reasonably implement and/or conduct a systematic list maintenance program that complies with federal law requiring deceased electors to be removed from the voter rolls," the lawsuit said.
But both a federal district court judge and a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, whose office oversees elections in the state, that Michigan was adequately maintaining voter rolls.
“The claims in this lawsuit were not supported by evidence," Benson said in a statement. "They were partisan attacks aimed at undermining people’s faith in our secure elections."
There are several reasons that people who are ineligible to vote could appear on the state's lists of voters, but voter fraud based on those discrepancies is extremely rare, and the circuit court found Michigan's work to maintain the rolls fell within the bounds of the law's requirements. "Michigan not only undertakes the kind of effort described ... but it also adopts additional standards as well," the justices wrote.
