Republican National Committee v. Whitmer
November 10, 2024
By: William & Mary Student Contributor
In March of 2021, the Biden/Harris administration issued executive order 14019 which directed agency heads to examine ways in which they could promote voter registration. The following year, in September of 2022, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced partnerships with Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to provide “voter registration information, materials and — if requested — assistance to Veterans, eligible dependents and caregivers at select VA facilities across the country”. This was followed by an announcement by the Small Business Administration (SBA) in March of 2024, that they too would be in partnership with Michigan “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan”.
The Republican National Committee and similarly aligned groups filed suit challenging Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s authority to establish the VA and SBA as Voter Registration Agencies (VRAs) in the State of Michigan. The latest filings in this case have been a motion for summary judgment made by the plaintiffs and a motion to dismiss made by the defendants filed on august 23rd and September 20th respectively.
The plaintiffs motion for summary judgement argues that the designation of the VA and SBA as VRAs in Michigan was done incorrectly because the National Voter Registration act (NVRA) does not specify how states are to designate VRAs and Michigan Law gives sole authority to do so to the legislature. Plaintiffs point to the last time a Michigan executive branch official designated a VRA which was in 1995 under the authority of a state statute that gave the governor 30 days to propose a list of additional “executive departments, state agencies, or other offices that will perform voter registration activities in this state” to designate as VRAs. However, when the then governor exercised this delegated authority through executive action, he claimed to reserve the power to designate “any other public office” in the future. No governor between 1995 and 2022 has tried to use this ‘reserved’ power. The Plaintiffs also point to the fact that the Michigan legislature knows how to delegate the power to designate VRAs because they passed legislation that give that power to the Secretary of State, although the statute does not go into effect until 2025 and is limited to making state agencies VRAs.
The Defendants Motion to dismiss and in opposition to plaintiffs motion for summary judgement begins by challenging the Plaintiffs’ standing. They say the injuries laid out in the Plaintiffs motion are simply speculation and are “highly attenuated”. Further, they say the Plaintiffs argument that the state is not following the law is a generalized grievance. Additionally, the defendants say the plaintiffs have failed to provide sufficient proof to satisfy the standards for summary judgement as they have no affidavits or other evidence. On the Merits, they argue that because the NRVA does not impose standards on how states should go about designating VRAs, the governor has the power to do so unilaterally because of the executive order signed by the Michigan governor in 1995.
The implication of a decision going either way in the next couple of weeks could be decisive in a state that was won by as little as .2% in 2016. If the courts side with the RNC, one of the remedies they are asking for is the cancellation of voter registrations made by the new VRA’s. If the court sides with the Governor, then the state will be going into the 2024 election with a stronger voter registration infrastructure than in years past.