On March 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party.
The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsuit against Lindberg and five other Nevada election officials, alleging they had failed to follow a 1993 federal law requiring they maintain accurate voter registration rolls. As evidence, the RNC pointed to three counties it claimed had more people on their rolls than voting-age residents.
Lindberg, who in 2022 campaigned for the clerk position as a “patriotic, hardworking, conservative Christian,” says she was “shocked” by the accusation. The RNC hadn’t even inquired about her voter roll maintenance processes before wielding such a serious allegation. “It hurt my feelings,” Lindberg, a soft-spoken grandmother of nine, told me. And she notes: “I truly feel we’re one of the most secure and safest counties when it comes to election integrity.”
Lindberg shouldn’t take the lawsuit too personally. Three of the other election officials sued alongside her were also Republicans. One, Jim Hindle, was such a Donald Trump diehard in 2020 that he was indicted last December for serving as one of Nevada’s fake Trump electors. (The case was dismissed; Hindle declined to comment.) Lindberg and her fellow Republican clerks are just collateral damage in an aggressive and far-flung RNC strategy to contest the 2024 election before a single vote has been cast.
In Lyon County—which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR—the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an “impossibly high” percentage, suggesting “an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties.
More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically.
“They take one measure of one thing in one place, purport to compare it with another measure of another thing in a different place, and arrive at a conclusion that does not follow,” says Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former adviser in the Biden administration. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘My clock doesn’t match my thermometer, so that means I need to fill up my car.’” Or as Laena St-Jules, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general, put it in a letter responding to the RNC’s allegations: “This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
However math-challenged, the RNC’s organized and well-financed legal approach is a sea change from 2020, when the party’s effort to hijack the Oval Office was frenzied and reactionary. The previous attempt was marked by a bevy of postelection lawsuits brimming with outlandish claims, and surreal press conferences headlined by the party’s legal frontman, Rudy Giuliani, who once famously addressed reporters outside a Philadelphia landscaping business next to a porn shop; in another briefing, black hair dye oozed from the former New York City mayor’s scalp as he stammered on about widespread fraud that he could never prove. (Giuliani was disbarred in July by a state appeals court that said he “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”)
Even those incoherent efforts had a notable effect. Just before the 2020 election, 55 percent of Republican voters expressed confidence in the electoral process, according to a Monmouth University poll. Two weeks after the election, as Giuliani, Trump, and other Republicans flooded the courts and the airwaves with baseless allegations of fraud, only 22 percent did.
The party’s recent maneuvering suggests a far more sophisticated—and more dangerous—strategy. Co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the RNC is mobilizing what it has called the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” which will involve “100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys.” Spearheading this effort is Christina Bobb, the former One America News personality and Trump lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for her alleged involvement in Trump’s fake elector scheme.
“This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. (After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the ticket, Republicans expanded their aim to question the legality of Harris becoming the presumed Democratic nominee. Republicans provided no basis for their argument; the RNC did not respond to broader questions about the legal strategy.)
“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November, or to change administrative procedure in elections between now and November,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “but to seed the ground for claims that an election was stolen.”
Multiple times a month, Ingham County clerk Barb Byrum sits down at her desk in a stone-clad government building southeast of Lansing, Michigan, and compares the recent death certificates her office has received against the county’s Qualified Voter File. Each death gets her condolences—and a distinct marking on the QVF: “CHALLENGED. DECEASED.”
This same process plays out in all 83 of the state’s counties and is just one of many ways the state maintains its voter rolls. After this county-level review, city and township clerks verify and finalize the county clerk’s markings. In Michigan, Nevada, and almost every other state, secretaries of state and county clerks share the responsibility of keeping their master rolls accurate. In addition to checking the lists against death certificates and Social Security data to cull deceased voters, state election officials cross-check with DMV data to identify changes of address. Further, election mail returned as “undeliverable” allows clerks to mark a voter “inactive” and—if that person doesn’t respond to mailings or vote for two more election cycles—remove them from the rolls.
Despite these safeguards, Byrum has received multiple emails from so-called election integrity activists urging her to purge batches of purportedly dead voters. Two of the lists she’s received in the last four months contained the same names, which the office investigated, but it found that the voters in question did not have death certificates.
Activists have besieged clerks around the state with similar lists, prompting Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to twice write to clerks to reiterate the proper rules and procedures for updating the QVF. The lists people send in “do not constitute permissible challenges and clerks should not reject or challenge ballots on the basis of these emails,” she wrote in one missive.
Such tactics extend beyond Michigan. In March, the New York Times reported that a “network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump” was “quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states.” In some cases, this cabal “pressed local officials,” even cautioning that clerks may be breaking the law if they did not remove the flagged names. In Michigan, these self-appointed fraud watchdogs nicknamed their efforts “soles to the rolls,” a riff on the “souls to the polls” events some Black churches hold to encourage parishioners to vote.
The attempts may seem bush league, but the underlying allegation that state rolls are teeming with dead people is buttressed by a much more official effort, an RNC lawsuit against Benson this past spring alleging that “impossibly high” registration rates throughout Michigan “indicate an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.”
If that language sounds familiar, it should: It’s the same phrasing the RNC’s lawyers from Consovoy McCarthy used in their lawsuit against the Nevada clerks. The RNC claims that the fraud it alleges in Nevada is even more pervasive in Michigan—that at least 53 Michigan counties have “more active registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” and that an additional 23 have registration rates exceeding 90 percent of their adult populations. By this accounting, the rolls in all but seven of the state’s 83 counties would be crowded with voters who have died or moved away.
“These claims are designed not to change policy
between now and November…but to seed the ground for claims that an election was stolen.”
Both RNC lawsuits rest on disingenuous interpretations of the National Voter Registration Act, says historian Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The bipartisan 1993 law was intended to increase public participation in elections. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, had previously outlawed explicitly racist hurdles such as literacy tests, but until the NVRA was enacted, registering to vote remained challenging. “You had to go down to a voter registration office,” Keyssar says. “You had to figure out, depending on the state and sometimes even the city or county, where the office was, what hours it was open, and what identification materials they would need.”
Also known as the Motor Voter Act, the NVRA made the process more accessible by requiring state governments to offer voter registration to people applying for driver’s licenses. It stipulated that states must make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters,” but officials also must protect voters from arbitrary or partisan purges by waiting two full federal election cycles before removing anyone they have flagged as inactive.
The claim of inflated voter rolls in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s motion to dismiss the RNC lawsuit, is based on a figure that includes inactive voters who cannot yet be removed legally, per the NVRA. The motion also counters that the RNC doesn’t “identify a single voter in any Michigan county that is ineligible to be registered but nonetheless appears as an active voter.”
Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, says the RNC is “misunderstanding the difference between active voter records and inactive voter records, and often conflating the two, possibly intentionally, to create the impression that there’s some massive fraud on the horizon when that’s of course not the case at all.”
What’s more, Michigan and Nevada each backstop their voter roll maintenance with help from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan information-sharing nonprofit whose 24 member states (plus DC) compare voter registrations against DMV data to identify people who are registered in multiple states, who have duplicate registrations within a state, who have died, or who, in extremely rare cases, have cast ballots in more than one state. In 2020, ERIC flagged the registrations of 1.5 million voters who may have moved between states, 1.2 million who may have moved within a state, 135,000 potential duplicate registrations, and 73,000 possibly deceased voters. Many had already been flagged, but ERIC is helpful as a fail-safe to ensure necessary fixes get made.
Yet in a wildly ironic twist, ERIC has itself become a right-wing target. Since 2022, nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the compact based on unfounded claims that ERIC is a “left-wing voter registration drive” designed to boost Democratic candidates. This conspiracy theory was promulgated by the Gateway Pundit blog, which also claimed that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting were crisis actors and that Dr. Anthony Fauci planned an avian flu outbreak to promote vaccines. Never mind that ERIC’s mission is to improve the accuracy of the rolls and make elections more secure—or that the top election officials in four of the seven states that founded ERIC in 2012 were Republicans. The withdrawal of those nine states leaves ERIC with less data to cross-check.
Right-wing fantasies of voter rolls packed with dead and ineligible voters are nothing new, especially in Michigan. In September 2020, a conservative group calling itself the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and chaired by Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma lawyer at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, began claiming that Michigan’s rolls may have contained more than 27,000 dead people. According to court records, PILF never produced the crossmatching information it supposedly used in its determination. The group couldn’t even prove all of the names it cited belonged to registered Michigan voters. It finally filed a lawsuit in November 2021. The case was dismissed this past spring, and the RNC filed a similar action two weeks later.
The federal judge who tossed the PILF case pointed to US Election Assistance Commission data indicating that Michigan election officials are actually quite good at keeping their rolls up to date: For the 2018 cycle, Michigan ranked fourth out of 50 states for purging the largest number of dead voters from its rolls; in 2020, it ranked fifth, removing 187,608 deceased people.
Michigan’s Senate, then controlled by Republicans, debunked similar 2020 claims that the dead were voting en masse. In June 2021, after hearing 28 hours of testimony from almost 90 people and reviewing thousands of pages of subpoenaed government documents, three Trump-supporting GOP lawmakers and one Democrat released a 55-page report proclaiming they’d found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” in which Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 154,000 votes.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely.”
Court cases and investigations often drag on for months or years as fabricated allegations harm voter confidence and even incite violence, like Michigan experienced after Election Day 2020. Court records detail how staffers at the Bureau of Elections began receiving an onslaught of emails and calls, many threatening violence. Over the next few weeks, the bureau shut down its phone lines and closed its offices due to bomb threats. Officials had to hold meetings at undisclosed locations and even be provided with police protection. Dozens of gun-toting protesters showed up at the home of Benson, the secretary of state, as she was putting up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son.
In Maryland and Pennsylvania, the United Sovereign Americans, a far-right group that has claimed to measure “the effect of millions of instances of apparent election fraud,” is pursuing voter roll lawsuits similar to the PILF case. But experts say the Michigan and Nevada lawsuits, with their RNC imprimatur, could prove more dangerous. “We now have a major political party bringing these lawsuits, and what that does is strengthens this narrative that there’s something wrong,” says Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed motions to intervene in several suits initiated by the RNC, including the Michigan case. “Regardless of whether they win, whether the case is dismissed, as they usually are, it still has the impact of creating mistrust.”
Democrats and Republicans alike have long engaged in legal battles over election rules. Some cases challenging new voting procedures are “legitimate efforts by partisans,” says Becker.
Days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary elections, for example, a federal judge extended the state’s absentee ballot receipt deadline by a week at the request of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. Citing an unprecedented surge in absentee ballot demand and postal delays during the pandemic, the judge ruled that ballots postmarked after Election Day must be counted as long as they were received by the extended deadline. The RNC appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing the change was ordered too close to Election Day. The Supreme Court agreed. Fair enough.
More recently, voting rights groups sued to block a new North Carolina law that would have permitted officials to discard the ballots of same-day registrants if a single notice sent to their mailing address had been returned as “undeliverable.” Following a January court injunction striking down part of the law, the state elections board issued a memo requiring that election officials reach out to the registrants by mail, email, and phone to allow them an opportunity to “cure” their ballot and have it counted if they could provide proof of address. Makes sense.
But another category of lawsuits—the sinister type—is abounding this cycle. These lawsuits, Becker says, are “not designed to win” but are regurgitating previously rejected arguments or challenging years-old election laws in hopes of gaining an edge, if only by manufacturing distrust. “They are premised on a view of the world that does not comport with reality,” says Loyola’s Levitt.
In addition to the voter roll cases in Michigan and Nevada, the RNC is recycling allegations over absentee ballot receipt deadlines that have been rejected repeatedly by the courts. This serves two purposes: Regardless of the outcome, the legal claims will inspire doubt in every state where they are filed. And the RNC may eventually find a conservative court willing to accept its argument.
That’s the approach that appears to be playing out in deep red Mississippi, where the RNC asked a federal court to strike down a state deadline on absentee ballots. A 2020 law passed nearly unanimously in the Republican-controlled state legislature allows the counting of absentee ballots that arrive up to five days after the election, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. (This differs from the Wisconsin case, which involved ballots postmarked after Election Day.) In its complaint, filed in a conservative division, the RNC argues the Mississippi law “extends the election” in violation of federal law and dilutes “honest votes” in a way that “specifically and disproportionately harms Republican candidates and voters.” (Trump’s baseless attacks on absentee voting have alienated some Republicans from that voting method.)
More than a dozen states have similar deadlines for mail-in ballots. It’s an important policy that safeguards the rights of voters whose ballots arrive late through no fault of their own, said Greta Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi, which filed an amicus brief in the case. These voters include overseas service members casting ballots from their deployments. As with the lawsuits challenging voter roll maintenance, the RNC’s claims in the Mississippi lawsuit have been previously debunked. Federal judges in Illinois and North Dakota—both Trump nominees—dismissed challenges to the post-election receipt deadlines, with the judge in Illinois writing: “Plaintiffs’ votes here are not diluted by other valid, lawfully cast votes.” (An appeal is pending.)
A federal judge also dismissed, in 2020, an RNC lawsuit challenging a New Jersey provision that allows clerks to accept nonpostmarked ballots up to 48 hours after polls close. (To arrive within that window, they would have likely been mailed before Election Day.) Here the claims of vote dilution were deemed “too speculative.” But this past spring, the RNC challenged Nevada’s similar policy on nonpostmarked ballots received no later than three days after Election Day. (The case is ongoing.) The Trump campaign is a plaintiff in both cases.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely,” says Levitt.
Back in Nevada, Lindberg, the Lyon County clerk, is a little less cynical. She came to see the RNC’s lawsuit against her and the other clerks as an opportunity for election officials to build some trust and “share information” in a court setting. “I have an open-book policy,” she says. If any local voter wants to come watch her do voter roll maintenance, she says she’ll “get him a chair and a cold water.”
A judge dismissed the Nevada case on June 18, but some locals are still riled up. “We get a lot of people yelling at us, calling us names, saying that we’re trying to cheat them,” Lindberg told me after the court ruled in her favor. (On July 2, the RNC filed a last-ditch effort to revive its claims.)
Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, thinks the RNC’s Michigan case, too, will eventually be dismissed, but she doesn’t believe winning was the group’s primary objective. “The court cases,” she says, “are an attempt to divert attention and resources away from election management and election administration, with the added bonus of sowing additional seeds of doubt in the integrity of our election.”
Additional reporting by Sarah Szilagy
