Unanimous panel decision in Public Interest Law Foundations v. Benson. No standing for plaintiffs for some of the claims, and I’m a bit surprised the panel made no effort to examine whether there’s a private right of action to enforce a federal law that speaks so clearly in terms of a responsibility placed upon the state. But from the heart of the opinion:

Third, the district court analyzed the mechanics of Michigan’s program. The court noted that Michigan undertakes a number of steps to ensure a well-functioning program, including: (1) comparing Social Security Administration death reports on a weekly basis to the CARS list; (2) reconciling the QVF with the CARS driver file on a quarterly basis; and (3) manually reviewing the bimonthly ERIC reports, which are created by comparing the QVF to the Social Security Death Index. Under this program, the district court noted, “nearly 8,000 of the ‘potentially deceased’ voters identified by PILF in its October 5, 2020 list had already been removed” by September 2023, and 5,766 had been removed before PILF filed its action in November 2021. Id. at Page ID #3658. While PILF argued that it is not enough to merely schedule registrant removal under these procedures, and that the entire list of 27,000 deceased registrants “should be fixed now,” Pl.’s Resp. Summ. J., R. 168, Page ID #3413, the district court disagreed. The court found that the NVRA “does not require states to immediately remove every voter who may have become ineligible,” and it was instead sufficient that the “record demonstrate[d] that deceased voters are removed from Michigan’s voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis.” Summ. J. Order, R. 180, Page ID #3658.

These factors ultimately led the district court to the conclusion that Michigan’s program fell squarely within the NVRA’s reasonable effort language. That determination was correct.