There was a historic victory for election integrity on Wednesday: A federal court approved aconsent decree in a lawsuit filed in Mississippi by the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) that requires a local county to finally clean up its voter registration list.
As The Foundry previously reported, the ACRU sued Walthall County (a majority-white county that Mitt Romney won in 2012) under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) because of the county’s failure to remove ineligible felons, dead voters, voters who had moved, and noncitizens from its voter rolls. In fact, Walthall County has more registered voters than the Census shows it has voting-age residents by 124 percent, a problem shared by a dozen counties in Mississippi. Section 8 of the NVRA requires states and counties to maintain accurate voter rolls by engaging in regular list maintenance that removes ineligible voters.
In the consent decree approved by Judge Keith Starrett of the Southern District of Mississippi, Walthall County must check its voter registration list against:
- The records of the Social Security Administration and the Mississippi Department of Health to find dead voters;
- State Department of Motor Vehicles records to find voters who have moved out of the county;
- Conviction records of the local county court clerk, the Mississippi Department of Corrections, and the Mississippi and Louisiana U.S. attorneys’ offices to find felons;
- The Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to find noncitizens; and
- Jury-duty declinations and county tax filings to find noncitizens and nonresidents.
No comments:
Post a Comment