Last week, just days before Election Day, the right-wing activist group Citizen AG filed lawsuits in federal courts in Arizona and Pennsylvania, alleging that the secretaries of state in each of those states had failed to maintain their state’s voter registration in accordance with the National Act voter registration. Each complaint alleges that the state in question has failed to make the required “reasonable effort” to remove the names of ineligible voters from “the official rolls of eligible voters” due to death, criminal convictions, changes in residence or voters’ own requests.
Citizen AG, legally known as the 1789 Foundation, Inc., considers its mission to ensure that states “inspect their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters before Election Day” And “assisting those counties that have not done so on their own” by using registered voters to challenge the registrations of others on a county-by-county basis. And the number of voters affected by this perceived failure is by no means small. In Arizona, Citizen AG estimated that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes had not removed “more than 1.2 million inactive and ineligible voters who did not respond to confirmation notices and did not vote in two subsequent federal elections”; in Pennsylvania, they claimed the number was closer to 278,000 voters.
Why then, especially given how close these elections are expected to be in Arizona and Pennsylvania, did Citizen AG wait so long to file a lawsuit? After all, other similar cases were brought by the Republican National Committee last March, but in Michigan and Nevada the Republican Party lost, as I noted less than two weeks ago. Even though the Arizona court ordered Fontes to make certain voter roll maintenance data available to Citizen AG, Citizen AG was denied the emergency relief it requested in both Arizona and Pennsylvania – orders that would have forced each state to remove hundreds of thousands of people , if in the case of Pennsylvania not more than one million, voters from their electoral rolls.
The secretaries of state responding to these lawsuits say Citizen AG is misinterpreting the data. In the Pennsylvania case, for example, Secretary of State Al Schmidt argued that there was no one-to-one correlation between the communications his office sent to voters who appeared to be on the move and the voters themselves. Rather, “Pennsylvania counties often send more than one message to the same voter,” he explains. He also notes that Citizen AG assumes that the number of inactive voters is “static”, without realizing that this changes every day due to events ranging from deaths to re-registration.
One can only guess at the real reason why Citizen AG filed these lawsuits too late, but one possibility is that they never expected to win. Instead, they might have filed these lawsuits more for their extrajudicial benefit. Specifically, I can imagine a universe in which after After the election, Citizen AG’s documents — which in themselves are not indicative of the merits of a lawsuit, let alone its likelihood of success — are being circulated and touted as “evidence” of voter fraud if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential election one of these cases wins states. By touting the alleged significance of the data included in the Citizen AG documents, Trump supporters could blame Harris’ victories on a group of ineligible voters — perhaps even noncitizen voters — and on Democratic officials who had been warned that their registers were defective, but refused to do so. take action. (Citizen AG founder Ryan Yoder did not immediately respond to my requests for comment.)
The significance of this type of data for those complaining of voter fraud and/or voter ineligibility is even more important when one remembers the more than sixty lawsuits filed by Donald Trump’s campaign or other Republican entities and candidates after the 2020 election. Time and time again, these lawsuits complained about voter machine errors and/or intentional misconduct, but without any evidence beyond vague witness statements or technical data that did not reflect what it was promised it would reveal. This time, instead of relying on vote manipulation, GOP candidates, surrogates and organizations have rallied around another so-called bogeyman: the ineligible voter. And Citizen AG’s misuse of the states’ own data compilations, which, as the Arizona judge concluded, included “hypothetical calculations based on two-year-old data,” could ultimately play the leading role in after the elections stories, if not in new lawsuits.
Of course, the lawsuits could have been true last-ditch efforts to put an end to what Citizen AG believes is illegal behavior. But something tells me we could see their accusations circulating again later this week.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
