CHICAGO — (AP) — The Republican National Committee on Tuesday launched a massive effort to probe voter registration lists nationwide amid a broader strategy to seize on voter rolls to question the integrity of elections.
RNC sent public records requests asking for documents related to voter roll list maintenance to the top election officials in 48 states and the District of Columbia, asserting that the public should know how states are removing ineligible people from voter rolls, including dead people and non-citizens.
The move came the same day President Donald Trump took sweeping executive action seeking major changes to U.S. elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It also coincides with common misinformation narratives about non-citizens and dead people voting, cases of which are exceedingly rare and are largely caught and prosecuted when it does occur.
“Voters have a right to know that their states are properly maintaining voter rolls and quickly acting to clean voter registration lists by removing ineligible voters,” RNC chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.
The National Voter Registration Act already requires states to take steps to maintain accurate and current voter registration lists.
Since the 2020 election, conservative activists have seized on false claims of widespread fraud as justification for scrutinizing the work of election officials to maintain voter lists. County election officials have reported being inundated with public record requests that consume workers' time, often as they are trying to prepare for elections.
In 2024, six in 10 local election officials responding to a survey conducted by The Elections & Voting Information Center at Portland State University agreed with the statement that “unduly burdensome requests significantly impede my ability to perform my duties.”
There have been attempts to challenge large numbers of individual voters based on flawed analysis. States have numerous ways to identify voters who have died or moved, including scanning death and court records to ensure the list of eligible voters and their addresses are as accurate and up to date as possible.
Twenty-four states also are part of a bipartisan, multi-state effort to help them maintain accurate voter lists. It used to be a larger group, but nine GOP-led states left the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC, two years ago as conservatives raised questions about its funding and purpose.
Over the last two years, ERIC has provided members with 1,040 reports identifying 8.2 million voter records that were likely out of date, according to research presented at a meeting earlier this year of chief election officials. The data included voters who had died, moved within a state or to another state and duplicate registrations.
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