Great Lakes Wire

A federal judge in Michigan shot down Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) to force her office to remove deceased voters from the registration rolls.

PILF filed the lawsuit in November 2021 in the U.S. Western District of Michigan after identifying 25,975 deceased voters on the rolls. PILF alleges that Benson is in violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993; it requires officials to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”

Before filling the suit, PILF notified Benson’s office of its findings of deceased registrants on the state’s voter rolls in September 2020 and November 2020 and alerted her that she was in violation of the NVRA.

For her part, Benson, among other arguments, asserted that PILF lacked standing to bring the case.

“Secretary Benson argues that PILF’s complaint lacks any allegation of an injury-in-fact particular to PILF, much less one 'fairly traceable' to any conduct by Secretary Benson, or which is likely to be redressed by the relief requested from this Court,” Judge Jane Beckering wrote in her opinion.

But Beckering wrote later in her opinion that “PILF has alleged that over 25,000 deceased registrants remain on Michigan’s QVF and that thousands of these registrants have remained on the active rolls for decades. Further, PILF alleged that it gave this information to Secretary Benson, who, for over one year, 'did nothing about it,' despite the mandates of the NVRA and Michigan’s Election Law. The factual allegations, accepted as true, plausibly give rise to an entitlement to relief under the NVRA.”

Lauren Bowman, spokeswoman for PILF, told Great Lakes Wire that judge’s denial means that the lawsuit continues, but no hearing dates have been announced.

Aneta Kiersnowski Crisp, press secretary for Benson, said in a statement released to Great Lakes Wire reacting to the ruling that the office wanted to “assure Michigan citizens that Michigan’s voter registration list is maintained in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws and our system has secure protocols in place to ensure its integrity.

“First, voter registrations of people who have died are immediately cancelled when election officials receive official confirmation of their death, typically from the Social Security Administration’s Master Death Index updates, which are sent to the Bureau of Elections weekly,” she wrote in an email. “Additional inactive registrations were previously identified by the statewide mailing carried out by the bureau in 2020 – the first such mailing in a decade – and that resulted in more than 400,000 registrations slated for cancellation in 2025 to comply with the waiting period required under federal law.”

In April 2021, PILF reached a court settlement agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of State over 21,000 deceased registrants on the commonwealth’s rolls. Bowman said that the department has complied with its side of the agreement – to provide PILF with updated voter rolls at three-month intervals.

She added that some arrests for voter fraud have been made since PILF provided the list of deceased registrants.