A public interest group has sued the city of Detroit in federal court, claiming it has thousands of dead people on its voter lists and even more duplicate names of registered voters — problems the group fears could lead to voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election.
The lawsuit, however, does not claim that someone living ever actually tried to vote as a deceased voter in Detroit. Nor does it allege that any voter fraud has actually occurred in Detroit, a majority-black Democratic stronghold that played pivotal roles in the last two elections, one way or another, and are expected to do so again in 2020.
The lawsuit cites the 2016 election, but it raises no issues of actual fraud. Rather, it claims that the city isn’t properly cleaning its voter registration records, as required by law, but instead allows the rolls to be replete with typos, dead people, duplicate registrations and mistakes about gender and birth: One Detroit voter is listed as being born in 1823 —14 years before Michigan was annexed into the Union.