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Voter Protection: Litigation

Active Cases

Colorado

Common Cause of Colorado, et al. v. Buescher, Civil Action No. 1:08‑CV‑02321‑JLK‑KMT (D. Colo. 2008)

In 2008, Advancement Project discovered through public records requests and analysis that the registrations of up to 30,000 voters were being cancelled in Colorado, for reasons including the return of voter notices as undeliverable. These voters remained in the state database, but were purged from voter rolls sent to polling locations, and consequently were unable to vote by regular ballot. Advancement Project and co-counsel filed a lawsuit on behalf of Colorado Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota, a non-partisan civic engagement campaign, and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against the Colorado Secretary of State to challenge illegal purges and cancellation practices that had removed between 16,000 and 30,000 voters from Colorado's rolls. Plaintiffs’ amended complaint challenges two additional purge practices that they allege violate the NVRA and/or HAVA: (1) marking infrequent voters for cancellation solely because they fail to vote in a general election and (2) removing allegedly duplicate voters without employing sufficient safeguards to ensure the records relate to the same voter and without affording them prior notice. Prior to the 2008 general election, plaintiffs obtained a stipulated agreement overseen by the court that provided that voters wrongfully removed from the rolls are presumed eligible and receive extra protections when voting by provisional ballot in the November election. Two days later, at an emergency hearing, the court issued an order barring Secretary Coffman from purging any more voters from the rolls before Election Day -- for any reason.

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Florida

Florida State Conference of the NAACP v. Browning, Civil Action No. 07-402, (N.D. Fla. 2007).

Advancement Project and co-counsel represent plaintiffs Florida State Conference of the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in a lawsuit against Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning challenging a Florida state law that prevented voter registration applicants from being added to the voter rolls if the state could match or otherwise validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on the applicant’s registration form. Since it was enacted in 2005, this law prevented tens of thousands of eligible applicants, particularly African Americans and Latinos, from becoming registered to vote. After a preliminary injunction was issued in December 2007, the Secretary of State added 16,000 voters to the rolls. In April 2008, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the injunction and plaintiffs unsuccesfully renewed their attempt to obtain a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the law.

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Michigan

United States Student Association Foundation et al. v. Land, Civil Action No. 2:08‑CV‑14019‑SJM‑RSW (E.D. Mich. 2008)

Advancement Project and co-counsel brought a federal lawsuit challenging two statewide voter purge programs that could have disfranchised hundreds of thousands of Michigan voters. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Detroit against Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, Michigan Bureau of Elections Director Christopher M. Thomas, and Ypsilanti Clerk Frances McMullen. As a result of the litigation, Advancement Project has (1) forced the state to disclose the names of approximately 230,000 people slated for purging after the November 2008 elections, as a result of a questionable purge program implemented between July and August 2006; (2) obtained a federal court injunction requiring the state of Michigan to restore 5,500 wrongfully purged persons to the rolls and prohibiting the state from continuing its unlawful practice of canceling voters whose original voter identification cards are returned as undeliverable; and (3) obtained a federal court ruling that Michigan’s practice of immediately canceling approximately 70,000 voters per year from the rolls, without notice, after such voters obtain driver’s licenses in other states, is unlawful.

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Archived Cases

FLORIDA

League of Women Voters v. Browning, CASE NO. 08-21243-CIV-ALTONAGA (S.D. Fla. 2008)

Advancement Project and co-counsel filed a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of an amended version of a Florida law regulating third-party voter registration activities that was originally enacted in 2005. Although the motion for preliminary injunction was denied, the court’s ruling clarified several provisions of the law in a manner favorable to plaintiffs.

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  • Complaint
  • Order Denying Motion for Preliminary Injunction

League of Women Voters v. Browning, Case No. 06-21265-CV-PAS (S.D. Fla. 2006)

Advancement Project and co-counsel represented several organizational plaintiffs who challenged a Florida law enacted in 2005 that imposed potentially ruinous fines and burdensome reporting requirements on non-partisan, third-party organizations that conduct voter registration. As a result of this law, several third-party organizations shut down or dramatically curtailed their nonpartisan voter registration operations. In August 2006, the court preliminarily enjoined enforcement of the law.

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Diaz v. Browning, Case No. 04-22572- civ-King (S.D. Fla. 2004)

Advancement Project and co-counsel represented several individual voters and the AFL-CIO, SEIU, AFSCME International, and AFSCME Council 79 in a lawsuit challenging several Florida laws that prohibit county election officials from: (1) processing voter registration applications on which the applicant did not check a checkbox and (2) permitting voter applicants who submit incomplete voter registration applications to complete their application after the registration deadline and vote in the upcoming election.

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Georgia

ACORN v. Cox, CIVIL ACTION NO.1:06-CV-1891-JTC (N.D. Ga. 2006)

Advancement Project and co-counsel filed a lawsuit on behalf of ACORN, the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, and several other organizations that conduct voter registration to challenge rules promulgated by the Georgia State Election Board that require that completed voter registration applications be separately sealed by an applicant before being handed to a private voter registration worker and prohibit the photocopying of completed voter registration applications. In September 2006, the court preliminarily enjoined the rules but dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice in 2008.

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Louisiana

Acorn v. Blanco, Civil Action 06-0611 Section B-1 (E.D. La. 2006)

Advancement Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of ACORN and other plaintiffs to force the state of Louisiana to provide satellite voting in places where large numbers of Katrina victims were temporarily residing. The district court denied plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction.

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Ohio

Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, Civ. Action No. 81-3876 (D. N.J. 2004)

Four days before the 2004 presidential election, Advancement Project filed a motion to intervene and reopen the DNC v. RNC case on behalf of an Ohio voter, Ebony Malone. Ms. Malone was a newly registered African-American citizen of Cleveland who was on the list of voters to be challenged by the Ohio Republican Party. The district court granted Ms. Malone’s motion to intervene, and on November 1, one day before the election, found that the RNC had violated the consent decree and ordered the RNC to refrain from using its compiled list of voters to challenge those voters. Although the Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted the RNC’s motion to stay of the lower court’s order, the stay was issued so late on Election Day that the district court’s order, along with orders issued in other concurrent cases challenging the challenges, resulted in an absence of widespread challenges on Election Day. And, Ms. Malone successfully cast a ballot without being challenged.

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Virginia

Virginia State Conf. of the NAACP v. Kaine, Case No. 3:08 CV 692 – RLW (E.D. Va. 2008)

Advancement Project, on behalf of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, sued Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and top Commonwealth election officials for unconstitutional allocation of polling place resources. The lawsuit asserted that election officials in Richmond, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach had adopted resource allocation plans that unconstitutionally, and otherwise, unlawfully under- or mis-allocated polling place resources–specifically, voting machines and poll workers–in a manner that infringed and burdened the rights of the voters in these cities and that would disfranchise voters in these locales, including, particularly, African-American voters in Richmond and Virginia Beach.

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