If Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson gets her way, she will not be removing deceased registrants from her state’s voter rolls anytime soon. Even when a court ordered her to do so, she challenged it.
In August, a U.S. District Court denied Benson’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit, filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative law firm committed to election integrity, that would force her to clean Michigan’s voter lists by removing residents who are deceased or no longer live in the state. In the fall of 2020, the group notified Benson of deceased registrants it found on Michigan’s voter lists and her obligation to remove them under the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to make “a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”
Despite apparently violating the law, Benson didn’t remove the ineligible registrants. PILF’s ongoing lawsuit seeks to compel Benson to remove nearly 26,000 dead voters from Michigan’s rolls. As The Federalist previously reported:
According to PILF’s own analysis of the 25,975 deceased registrants: 23,663 registrants have been dead for five years or more, 17,479 registrants have been dead for at least a decade, [and] 3,956 registrants have been dead for at least 20 years.
To find dead registrants, PILF purchased Michigan’s voter roll and hired a data analytics expert to check the names against social security records and other publicly available documentation of deceased individuals such as
