The Supreme Court should ensure that the National Voter Registration Act is properly applied by the federal judiciary.
here is a glaring election integrity problem that only the U.S. Supreme Court can remedy: federal courts are misinterpreting the public disclosure provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, frustrating the intent of Congress to enlist the public’s help in ensuring accurate and up-to-date voter rolls. By doing so, those courts are facilitating fraud.
Recent polling by Gallup shows that 43 percent of Americans are either “not at all confident” or “not too confident” in the security of our elections. One of the reasons is no doubt the recognized problem of sloppy registration lists. A 2012 study by Pew found that 24 million, or one in eight, voter registrations in the U.S. were “significantly inaccurate.”
This is a serious indictment of state election officials, who are obviously not doing what’s necessary to ensure those rolls are accurate. Inaccurate voter rolls can lead to fraud that endangers the integrity of the election process. A 2020 study by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that compared voter registration lists and voter histories from 42 states found more than 144,000 instances of potentially fraudulent voting during the 2016 and 2018 elections.
That included 14,608 deceased-but-registered voters who cast ballots; more than 81,000 voters registered twice at the same address who cast two votes; almost 8,400 individuals who voted twice because they were registered in two different states; 5,500 voters who cast two ballots because they were registered twice in the same state but at different addresses; and 34,000 individuals who cast ballots despite being registered at nonresidential addresses ranging from commercial establishments to vacant lots and parks.
But there is currently a split in the federal courts of appeal over whether the public and organizations concerned with election integrity have standing — that is, the ability to file a lawsuit — under the National Voter Registration Act to pursue claims against states that refuse to provide access to voter registration information, restrict the use of such information, or impose criminal and civil penalties for “misuse” of that information. The disagreement among the appellate courts means that the federal rights of voters and advocacy groups depend on where they live.