Here is a fun little brain teaser for you. Take one federal law, apply it in three different parts of the country, and get three completely different answers about whether you are allowed to look at your state's voter rolls. If that sounds like the setup to a bad joke, congratulations, you now understand American election law.
As USA Journal reported, the case of PILF v. Nago out of Hawaii is heading toward the Supreme Court, and it centers on a question that really should not be this hard: does the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 mean what it says? The law, commonly known as Motor Voter, requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls and make the relevant records available for public inspection. Congress wrote it in plain language. Apparently plain language is no match for the federal judiciary.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, run by Christian Adams, won a case in the First Circuit establishing that Maine had to open its voter rolls to public scrutiny. Maine Secretary of State Sheena Bellows had been keeping those rolls tucked away, hiding duplicates, mistakes, and registrations belonging to dead voters. The court told her to knock it off. Maine then responded by passing a law that criminalized discussing problems found on the rolls and literally targeted PILF by name. The court fixed that too, because apparently Maine needed to be told twice.
Then you hop over to the Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and the rules change entirely. That court decided Motor Voter is basically a participation trophy. As long as a state makes some effort at maintaining rolls, it passes, no matter how sloppy the results actually are. If you find a mess, tough luck. You have no standing to do anything about it.
Hawaii managed to go even further. When PILF requested election records under the explicit text of the law, the lower court told them they should have sued individual counties first. The Ninth Circuit reversed on standing but then ruled that voter rolls are not even records the law requires to be disclosed. Read that again if you need to. The law about voter roll maintenance does not, according to the Ninth Circuit, cover voter rolls. Brilliant.
This is the circuit split the Supreme Court now gets to untangle. And the timing matters. Trump's Thursday night address cited 270,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote, a number derived only from states that actually cooperated with federal data requests. Blue states are refusing to hand over their rolls, which is precisely the kind of stonewalling Motor Voter's transparency provisions were designed to prevent.
The Founders built a decentralized election system on purpose. What they did not intend was a system where your legal right to verify that elections are on the level evaporates the moment you cross a state line. The Supreme Court has the chance to make one law mean one thing everywhere. Novel concept.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
