Lawsuit says Michigan is violating Motor-Voter law

A new lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan alleges that two voter-removal programs being run by Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land violate federal law and may deny tens of thousands of Michigan citizens the right to vote.

The case primarily involves a federal law called the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, better known as the Motor-Voter act. The NVRA was passed to make it easier to register to vote and to maintain one’s status as a legal voter. For instance, it mandated that residents be given the chance to register to vote when renewing their driver’s license and through the mail. The law also required every state to keep a central list of registered voters and provided safeguards against unjustified removal from that list.

Michigan has used a central list of all registered voters, known as the Qualified Voter File (QVF), since 1998. Election officials in each county have direct access to this list in order to know who is registered to vote and in which precinct. When someone registers to vote, the clerk must first check to see if that person is already registered in another precinct in order to avoid having someone vote twice. If they are not already registered, they are added to the QVF. But it is the procedures by which the state may remove someone from the list that are at issue in this suit. According to the legal complaint filed in this case:

Pursuant to the NVRA, a voter may not be removed from the voters list unless (1) the voter has requested removal; (2) state law requires removal by reason of criminal conviction or mental capacity; (3) the voter has confirmed in writing that he has moved outside the jurisdiction maintaining the specific voter list, or (4) the voter both (a) has failed to respond to a cancellation notice issued pursuant to the NVRA and (b) has not voted or appeared to vote in the two federal general elections following the date of notice.

The complaint alleges that Michigan’s procedures for removing someone from the list do not conform to the procedures required by the NVRA because, in this state, clerks must remove someone from the QVF if the voter registration card that is mailed to the voter is returned as undeliverable. The complaint argues:

While this procedure would prevent a voter from identifying a fraudulent name or address, it also serves to disenfranchise qualified voters whose cards are returned as undeliverable due to postal error, clerical error, inadvertent routing within a multi unit dwelling, and even simple misspelling or transposition of numbers in an address.

The complaint also alleges that Michigan’s procedures for removing voters due to their application for a driver’s license in another state violate the NVRA. Under Michigan procedures, according to the complaint, clerks immediately remove anyone from the voter list if the clerk “receive(s) notice from a cooperating state motor vehicle licensing bureau that an individual has surrendered his or her Michigan driver’s license and applied for a driver’s license in another state.”

But the complaint notes that there are common situations in which a Michigan citizen might get a driver’s license in another state while maintaining their official residency, and therefore their official voting place, in Michigan:

Plaintiffs’ members, for various reasons, may procure a driver’s license in a state other than Michigan while intending to maintain their Michigan residency. Students who spend eight or nine months per year at an out-of-state college, or citizens who spend several months per year in a warmer climate often elect to obtain an out-of-state driver’s license while maintaining their Michigan residency. Indeed, some states require individuals who are in state for a certain period or who take certain actions to obtain an in-state driver’s license even if their permanent residence remains in Michigan.

For instance, the state of Ohio requires that anyone who signs a lease must obtain an Ohio driver’s license and Wisconsin law requires anyone residing in that state to get a Wisconsin driver’s license within 60 days. The complaint notes that the state of Michigan removes some 280,000 voters from the QVF every year through this procedure, many of whom are likely still eligible to vote in the state due to the situations noted above.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a preliminary injunction forbidding the use of these procedures to purge voters from the QVF. The cooperating firm in this case is Pepper Hamilton LLC, a firm that has worked with the ACLU doing pro bono work many times. They were the lead attorneys in 2005 in a now-famous federal case in which it was ruled that public schools could not teach so-called “intelligent design” theory in science classrooms.