A Virginia-based group that claims it’s only interested in ensuring fair elections yesterday sued the Boston Elections Department to gain access to the city’s voter rolls so it can check them to make sure the dead and the undocumented are not voting in national elections – such as Tuesday’s primaries.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation of Arlington, VA, whose president served on a Trump commission to find widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, only it didn’t, says Boston election officials have ignored its request to hand over the city’s voter rolls so it can go over them with a fine-toothed comb.
The group says this violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which, while aimed at making it easier for people to vote, contains a “public disclosure” provision it says requires public access to at least two years of records to prove that elections officials are keeping accurate and current voter rolls – and that that includes individual voter records.
The complaint states the group asked the Elections Department for all of the records on Nov. 9, never heard back and so filed a formal complaint with the Secretary of State’s office – which oversees both elections records and public-records requests – on Feb. 7.
The group claims the failure to hand over the records is causing it “a concrete informational injury” preventing it from carrying it its ostensible purpose:
The Foundation gathers information about the state of the voter rolls across the nation for the purpose of assessing the accuracy and currency of the rolls and whether officials are complying with state and federal voter list maintenance standards, as well as other best practices. See “Errors in America’s Voter Rolls,” Public Interest Legal Foundation, https://publicinterestlegal.org/issues/voter-roll-error-map/.
The Foundation will use the requested records to further study and investigate Boston’s voter list maintenance activities and Boston’s compliance with state and federal law, and other best practices.
Defendant Boston Department of Election’s denial of the requested records affects the Foundation’s programming and will dictate where additional Foundation resources will be deployed for further investigations, communications with certain election officials, and necessary remedial measures.
The Defendant’s failure to allow inspection pursuant to federal law causes harm to the Foundation as it is required to expend additional resources and staff, while limiting the Foundation’s ability to fund other pending investigations and programming.
The Defendant’s failure to allow inspection of these records further injures the Foundation’s non-profit educational programming which includes providing policy advice to state officials and legislative guidance and testimony to Congress regarding state compliance with voting rights legislation requirements.
Further:
The Foundation needs continually to keep its institutional knowledge current and accurate so that the organization can operate efficiently and effectively, including for the purposes that Congress intended under the NVRA. The failure of Defendant to provide records subject to disclosure impairs and directly frustrates the Foundation’s accumulation of institutional knowledge about nationwide list maintenance practices by government officials. This impairment harms the Foundation’s ability accurately and comprehensively to educate the public and election officials about numerous circumstances, including the state of their own voter rolls. This impairment harms the Foundation’s ability accurately and comprehensively to educate members of Congress about numerous circumstances, including possible amendments to the NVRA, compliance with federal law by state officials, and the effectiveness of the NVRA’s four (4) articulated legislative purposes.
By denying the Foundation the ability to obtain the requested voter list maintenance records, Defendant is also impairing the Foundation’s ability to, inter alia, (1) study and analyze the City of Boston’s voter list maintenance programs and activities; (2) assess the City of Boston’s enforcement of state and federal voter eligibility requirements; (3) assess the City of Boston’s compliance with state and federal voter list maintenance obligations, and other best practices; and (4) aid the City of Boston in carrying out voter list maintenance programs and activities, and other best practices, thus injuring the Foundation.
State law classifies voter names and addresses as confidential – but says elections officials must make them available to candidates, political parties, the jury commissioner and “any other individual, agency or entity that the state secretary shall designate by regulation consistent with the purposes of this section, at a fair and reasonable cost not to exceed the cost of printing or preparing computer readable documents.”
In a decision last month, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit sided with PILF in a similar case against Maine’s secretary of state, ruling that the federal law and its public-disclosure provision overrule any state voter-roll restrictions. The court said federal regulations provide privacy controls for registered voters and that elections officials could redact “uniquely or highly sensitive personal information.” Its ruling does not fully define what that entails, but it cited rulings in other parts of the country that that could include birth dates and Social Security numbers.
In 2019, PILF and its president, J. Christian Adams, settled a defamation lawsuit in Virginia and formally apologized for publishing an “Alien Invastion” report that listed not just names, but phone numbers, addresses and even Social Security numbers of people removed from voter rolls for allegedly being non-citizens – although it blamed Virginia officials for “improperly removing” actual American citizens from the rolls.
PILF’s Boston lawsuit was filed by three attorneys – two on its staff in Virginia and Frank L. McNamara Jr., of Bolton, who served two years as US Attorney in Boston under Ronald Reagan, but who was forced to resign after the Justice Department concluded he had lied about his predecessor, Bill Weld, by claiming he had smoked marijuana.
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