Federal Judge Dismisses RNC’s Lawsuit Over Michigan Voter Rolls

A box of ballots in Omaha, Neb., on Oct. 2, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

A federal judge in Michigan has granted the state’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit in which the Republican National Committee (RNC) alleged that the state had failed to maintain its voter rolls in accordance with federal law.

Neither the RNC nor the two individual voter plaintiffs had standing to bring the case under Article III of the Constitution, Western District of Michigan Judge Jane Beckering held in her Oct. 22 opinion and order.

Beckering added that even if one of the plaintiffs had had standing, she wouldn’t have found that they plausibly alleged a violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Passed in 1993, the law has come up in other lawsuits during the 2024 election cycle and generally seeks to protect the integrity of voter rolls.

The RNC’s complaint alleged that Michigan failed to live up to the NVRA’s requirements. Among other things, it claimed that at least 53 counties “have more active registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18.”

“That number of voters is impossibly high,” it said, adding that “an additional 23 counties have active-voter registration rates” that eclipsed “the national and statewide voter registration rates in recent elections.”

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson expressed gratitude for Beckering’s ruling with a statement describing the lawsuit as “designed to plant false seeds of doubt about the integrity” of her work and the state’s elections.

“Let me be clear: We have secure elections in Michigan,” Benson said. “Our state’s bipartisan, professional election officials work with my team every day to ensure every valid vote—and only valid votes—count in this and every election.”

The RNC did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment before publication time.

Its lawsuit was one of many playing out in states before the elections in November. The RNC told The Epoch Times earlier this month that it was involved in more than 130 lawsuits across 26 states.

Alabama and Virginia have both seen lawsuits from the Justice Department alleging that they violated a provision of the NVRA blocking systemic changes to voter rolls 90 days before an election.

Other lawsuits emerged in Michigan and North Carolina over concerns about overseas voters’ casting ballots in the states despite never residing in them.

On Oct. 21, a judge in the Michigan Court of Claims rejected Republicans’ challenge, holding that the state’s rule allowing spouses and children of overseas voters to receive ballots didn’t violate state law. That same day, a similar ruling came from the Wake County Superior Court in North Carolina.

Beckering’s Oct. 22 ruling stated that oral arguments were unnecessary to resolve the parties’ case about voter rolls. Based on the court’s record, she held that the party did not do enough to demonstrate standing under precedents from either the U.S. Supreme Court or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Part of the RNC’s complaint alleged that the state’s “inaccurate voter rolls have forced plaintiffs to allocate additional resources and misallocate their scarce resources in ways they otherwise would not have.”

Beckering responded that that allegation and others regarding resource diversion “do not describe a personal stake in the outcome of a controversy as to warrant invocation of federal-court jurisdiction.”

The RNC, she also said, had described “only a speculative harm” in arguing that it may misallocate resources based on the voter registration lists.

Regarding the other plaintiffs, voters Jordan Jorritsma and Emerson Silvernail, Beckering stated that they only asserted “generalized grievances” and their complaint was “devoid of any factual allegations supporting a finding that the individual plaintiffs personally suffered some actual or threatened injury as a result of defendants’ putatively illegal conduct.”

Although Beckering said the court didn’t need to address the NVRA arguments, she did anyway. She suggested that the RNC’s arguments amounted to saying that something must be wrong but didn’t show that anything specific was.

“Absent plaintiffs’ legal conclusions and unwarranted factual inferences, which this court is not required to accept as true, there is no content in plaintiffs’ complaint that states a plausible claim under the NVRA,” she wrote.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.