Justin here. Here’s the complaint for the RNC/Trump Michigan lawsuit Dan flagged earlier today. It’s a mess.

I think this may be the second lawsuit that the 2024 Trump campaign has filed directly as a plaintiff, behind the Nevada case from May about the timing of receiving mail ballots. (I’d welcome the correction if that’s not true.)

The Michigan complaint correctly notes that Michigan designated local SBA and VA offices as voter registration agencies under the NVRA. (Disclosure: I played a part in helping to encourage SBA and VA to receive such designations.)

But the complaint goes off the rails pretty quickly thereafter:

• It was brought in federal court, but It alleges that the designation was improperly effectuated under Michigan law, which isn’t a thing federal courts have any say over. (Federal courts can’t order state officials to obey state law.)
• It’s not at all clear how the plaintiffs are injured by the allegedly improper designation. (There’s one election official involved as a plaintiff, and in an apparent bid to manufacture standing, the attorneys have stolen an out-of-context 2012 quote from a trial court in Texas about officials being the right defendants in election cases.)
• As Dan guessed even before seeing the complaint, even if the plaintiffs are right about what Michigan law requires (and I’m not at all sure they’re right about that), it’s not clear how the federal agencies even allegedly violated any provision of any federal law in saying “OK” when Michigan officials reached out. Indeed, saying OK when state officials reach out is exactly what federal officials are required by federal law to do.

So this should be thrown out of federal court pretty quickly. (Remember: we’re accustomed to thinking that lawsuits get filed when there are serious problems, and sometimes that’s true. But not always. To reprise a lesson of the 2020 cycle: a lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a “tweet” with a filing fee. Or a “post.” Or whatever we’re calling them now.)

But my questions don’t stop with the legal merits. In March, the same RNC sued Michigan based on claims that the state had failed to keep its voter rolls clean and accurate. (I’ve previously noted the flaws in their primary methodology.) Offering voters the chance to register while they’re doing other government paperwork — when the information gets reviewed by agency officials and when we know that it’s current — is among the cheapest, most reliable ways to make sure the information on the rolls is clean and accurate. What the SBA and VA are doing here (for any voter, of whatever partisan preference or none) isn’t any different from the process to offer registration at the DMV, as a one-stop procedure, when someone walks in to update their driver’s license with a new address. (And Michigan was widely recognized as the model for that DMV procedure before the federal government took it up in the NVRA, so it’s got decades of experience with the benefits of good info.)

Why does the RNC have an interest in making sure that veterans and small business owners can’t readily get registered at the same time they’re filling out other paperwork? If they want the Michigan rolls clean and accurate — a goal we share — why not seek high-quality registration information to update the rolls while the government is collecting the same info for other purposes anyway? Those questions may sound rhetorical, but I promise that the bewilderment is real: I understand knee-jerk partisan skepticism, but I’ve never understood even the ostensible underlying policy objection here. The plaintiffs complain that they have to deploy their resources to prevent fraud … but I honestly don’t get why the policy they’re suing to block doesn’t reduce the practical opportunity for fraud, while facilitating the accurate registration of groups they claim as supporters.