by Evan Stambaugh
An election integrity law firm has filed a complaint against Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon after discovering that nearly 600 duplicate registrants appear on state voter rolls.
With the assistance of the Upper Midwest Law Center (UMLC), the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has requested a hearing on the duplicate registrants at the Minnesota Office of Administrative Hearings in St. Paul.
The election integrity firm is seeking the deletion of the duplicate registrants by Aug. 9, the date of Minnesota primary elections.
According to PILF’s complaint, Secretary of State Simon is failing to comply with federal law stipulations in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that require duplicate names to be removed from voter rolls.
PILF found 586 duplicate names in total. Although Minnesota is exempt from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, they argue that HAVA and Minnesota state law require officials to keep an accurate, up-to-date record of voter registrations and remove any duplicated names.
“In Minnesota, the Secretary of State is the state official tasked with performing list maintenance with respect to the computerized voter registration list,” the complaint reads. “Therefore, the Secretary must ensure that duplicate names are ‘eliminated’ from the voter registration list.”
“However, Minnesota’s voter registration list contains more than 500 duplicated registration records sets, meaning more than 500 registrants are registered more than once in the state,” it adds.
Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) president J. Christian Adams released a statement on the filing of the complaint Monday.
“This is the first time a voter list maintenance complaint has been filed under HAVA,” he said. “This is an innovative approach to clean voter rolls and improve election integrity. PILF is leading the way in cutting edge legal strategy to protect free and fair elections. This complaint will result in removing the duplicate registrants from Minnesota’s voter roll.”
PILF “exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”
“PILF has revolutionized election litigation by first building a jurisprudence using federal election laws, and then deploying and weaponizing data to thwart attempts to corrupt our election process,” the organization says.
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Evan Stambaugh is a freelance writer who had previously been a sports blogger. He has a BA in theology and an MA in philosophy.
Photo “People Voting” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
