The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters. [...]
“They [local election officials] entered into consent decrees on behalf of supposed local election integrity groups, in Mississippi mainly, and a few in Texas,” Stuart Naifeh, Demos counsel, said. “And what they [PILF] have sought is things like we see in Ohio. They ask states to agree to purge people based on [recent] non-voting, and occasionally to use the SAVE database in certain places. And what we’ve seen is when these jurisdictions fight back, those things are not part of the settlements.”
“There’s really no basis" for PILF's claims of sloppy voter rolls, Naifeh said. “It’s only when they get a sweetheart consent decree that we see the worst elements of these kinds of [voter purge] programs coming into play.”
