The Trump campaign sued Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other state officials because she set up new voter registration agencies (VRAs) for veterans and small business owners. Whitmer said the case should be thrown out because the “claims are without merit.”
Trump sued Whitmer last month in the U.S. District Court Western District of Michigan, saying she illegally let people register to vote at places like the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Small Business Administration.
Last year, Whitmer gave an order for the Saginaw VA Medical Center, the Detroit VA Medical Center, and the department’s Detroit regional office to be named VRAs. People could also sign up to vote at the state Housing Development Authority, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other places.
A 35-page response to the case was written by Heather S. Meingast of the Michigan Attorney General’s Office on Friday on behalf of Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson, who is Secretary of State, and Jonathan Brater, who is Chief of Elections.
“Our veterans are the most respected people in America.” “And small businesses are the lifeblood of many towns across the country, including Michigan’s,” she wrote. “So it’s strange that Plaintiffs, the Republican National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party, and the campaign for Republican nominee Donald Trump, are against Michigan’s efforts to help veterans and small business owners register to vote.”
The Republican National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party, and Georgetown Township Clerk Ryan Kidd are among the plaintiffs. They say that under the National Voter Registration Act, only the state lawmakers and not the governor can name VRAs.
On the other hand, Whitmer says Trump’s “claims are without merit and must be dismissed for three reasons.” First, the state says that the lawsuit can’t be made in federal court because the plaintiffs say that only state law was broken.
This is because of the Eleventh Amendment. Second, the plaintiffs “have not alleged an injury in fact that is concrete and particularized under any theory.” Lastly, the defendants say that Michigan Election Law lets Whitmer choose which state organizations can help people register to vote.
It took federal cases by voter rights groups to get Michigan to follow the National Voter Registration Act, which was passed by Congress in 1993, Meingast writes. At the time, Gov. John Engler was in charge of Michigan. In the end, the NVRA was passed by the state assembly in late 1994. Before Whitmer’s presidential order in 2023, there had been no new VRAs.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an order telling state and government agencies to work together to get more people to register to vote and go to the polls. In answer, Whitmer said it was time to “review and update” the list of VRAs.
She told Benson to set them up by working with Veterans Affairs and the SBA. Meingast wrote that Benson’s “negotiation of such agreements was in line with her duty to coordinate the NVRA’s requirements.”
Trump’s lawyers say Whitmer’s order “undermines the integrity of elections by making it easier for people to register to vote even though they are not eligible to do so.” The people who are suing say they have to “deploy their time and resources to watch Michigan elections for fraud and abuse.”
“But they don’t give any evidence to back up these worries—they don’t find any cases of fraud or abuse in the registration work that VRAs do.” The Michigan Attorney General’s office wrote that bringing up “the possibility and potential for voter fraud” based on “hypotheses” rather than “actual events” is not enough to prove harm.
In its case against Trump, the state points to his failed action in a federal court in Pennsylvania, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., v. Boockvar, which sought to ban voting drop boxes in the 2020 election but failed.
Also on Friday, Trump and his supporters asked the judge to support them and say that Whitmer, Benson, and Brater had broken state law and that the Veterans Affairs and Small Business Association had broken the NVRA.
So far, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Maloney has only said that the radical Vet Voice Foundation could not get involved in the case. He has not yet made a decision on the case’s facts. The person said they would let the group file papers as an amicus curiae in the case.