Discussion: True The Vote's Mississippi Lawsuit May Have Weak Legal Underpinnings

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Discussion for article #224621

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I’d have to take issue with this reading.

The statute is concerned with
“all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters”.

Note that the records at issue are those concerning “official lists of eligible voters”; not lists merely of registered voters.

Now, under Mississippi law it appears that the voters eligible to vote in a primary run off election are those who have not voted in the initial primary of any other party. Thus the list of eligible voters in a run off primary is simply the list of the register voters minus any voters who have voted in any primary other than the one for which the runoff is being held. The poll books are records showing who voted in which primary and one of their purposes is to provide a process by which officials can make that determination. So the poll book should have been used by the officials to determine who among those seeking to vote in the run-off primary was on that list of voters eligible to do so. Thus the poll book from the initial primary should be available under the NVRA to allow the public to determine who should have been on the list of eligible voters.

The statute is further concerned with implementation and accuracy:

“all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters”[emphasis supplied] are supposed to be available to the public. The poll books from the primary run-off are the only means to test the accuracy with which the officials have maintained the list of eligible voters and hence must be accessible to the public.

Allowing this access furthers the underlying purpose and policy of this Act: allowing the public to determine both that all of those eligible to vote and desired to do so were allowed to vote and that no one who is not eligible in a particular election has done so. And this means of ascertaining the fairness with which an election has been conducted imposes no undue burden on any class of voter.