This Halloween, Michiganders should look out for ghosts on the state’s voter roll
For more than four years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has been fighting to force Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson to remove the names of deceased registrants from the voter roll. Her office has called our efforts an attempt to undermine Democracy.
THE DATA
PILF identified more than 25,000 deceased registrants on Michigan’s voter rolls. Of those:
🪦23,663 registrants have been dead for five years or more
🪦17,479 registrants have been dead for at least a decade
🪦3,956 registrants have been dead for at least 20 years
PILF has found the graves and obituaries (one pictured to the right) of many of these deceased registrants. Even after seeing gravestones and obituaries, Benson still refused to remove these deceased registrants. This 25,000 is just the tip of the iceberg. PILF’s data was only a subset of the voter roll. More deceased people are registered to vote in Michigan.
👻🎃🕸️SCARY FUN FACTS👻🎃🕸️
- Some of the people on PILF’s list were born before World War I even started
- Some of these registrants passed away when Bill Clinton was President
- The hit movies the year some of these registrants passed away were Home Alone and Pretty Woman
- There’s even a deceased mother and son on the voter roll
- Some of these deceased people, would be 110 if they were still alive today
FIGHTING IN COURT
Not only is it an election vulnerability to leave the names of deceased registrants on the voter roll, but it also violates federal law. Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), states are required to make a “reasonable effort” to remove the names of deceased registrants.
PILF sued Secretary Benson for violating the NVRA in November of 2021. This lawsuit has been submitted to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and is awaiting a decision
This is a precedent-setting case that will decide the standard for what constitutes a “reasonable effort” by election officials to remove the names of deceased registrants.
The Court will decide if under the NVRA states only need to have a program to remove the names of deceased registrants or if that program must be effective in removing the names of the deceased.
These gravestones illustrate that Secretary Jocelyn Benson’s program isn’t effective.