Minnesota Counties Sued for Duplicate Voter Registrations

An election-integrity group is filing a new legal complaint each day this week regarding a different Minnesota county for officials’ failure to remove duplicate voter registrations from county voter rolls.

“Federal law requires that duplicate registrations are eliminated from the voter roll,” said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). Adams is a former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“It is troubling that we are seeing duplicate registrants remain on the voter roll in Minnesota counties. Each duplicate registration allows for a person to vote more than once. Removing these duplicate registrations will make Minnesota’s elections more secure.”

PILF describes itself as “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity.” The nonprofit organization “exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity, and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”

Under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states are required to implement a computerized statewide voter registration list that is accurate and eliminates duplicate registrations.

PILF is now using state implementation provisions in HAVA that have “pretty much never been used for 20 years,” Adams told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a handful of states were exempted from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), also known as the Motor-Voter law because it allowed people to register to vote with relative ease at motor vehicle agencies and government offices. NVRA requires states to make a reasonable effort to remove ineligible individuals’ names from voter rolls.

It has been difficult to get Minnesota to clean up its voter rolls because the state couldn’t be forced to do it under NVRA, Adams said.

But then legal counsel discovered that HAVA contained a provision allowing states to pass rules about how to implement that law.