Waterford Today

LANSING, Mich. — Sen. Ruth Johnson emphasized the need for maintaining clean and accurate voter rolls during a press conference on the Capitol lawn on Wednesday, following her introduction of a Senate resolution encouraging Congress to take action.

“Accurate voter rolls are critical to the integrity of the elections process. Maintaining accurate records reduces the risk of fraudulent voting, and it can make the task of election administrators easier,” said Johnson, R-Holly. “Right now, 104.9% of Michigan’s voting-age population are registered to vote. You don’t have to be a mathematician to know that is alarming.

“When I was secretary of state, we made it a priority to maintain a clean Qualified Voter File. Unfortunately, the current secretary of state has done the opposite, and our voter rolls have become bloated with individuals who are not qualified to vote in Michigan. She even failed to remove from the voting rolls 177,000 names of people who no longer lived in our state until after she was sued.”

Senate Resolution 130 urges the U.S. Congress to enact the Voter Registration Efficiency Act, H.R. 2566, introduced by U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain, or similar legislation to create an efficient system ensuring that citizens are not registered to vote in multiple states.

“People should only be registered to vote in one state, yet we still have no system in place to ensure people are not voting in more than one state,” Johnson said. “I first worked on a federal Voter Registration Efficiency Act with then-Congresswoman Candice Miller in 2013. This is a simple bill that says if you permanently move to another state you would surrender your Michigan voter registration, just like you already surrender your Michigan driver’s license.”

Johnson also criticized Michigan election reform measures proposed by Senate Democrats.

“Senate Bills 603 and 604 would strip away protections that have been in our laws for 60 to 70 years and gut the authority of our state’s bipartisan county boards of canvassers to investigate any wrongdoing in our elections,” Johnson said. “Senate Bills 401-404 would cost taxpayers millions of dollars, create a huge new bureaucracy under the secretary of state, and put enormous new burdens on our local units of government and our clerks that are simply unnecessary.”