Last week, days before Election Day, the right-wing activist group Citizen SA filed suit in federal courts in Arizona And Pennsylvaniaalleging that the secretaries of state of each of these states failed to maintain their state’s voter rolls in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act. Each complaint claims that the affected state failed to make required “reasonable efforts” to remove the names of ineligible voters from “official lists of eligible voters” due to death, criminal convictions, changes of residence or own voter requests.

Citizen AG, legally known as 1789 Foundation, Inc., sees his mission because both ensure that states “inspect their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters before Election Day” And “helping counties that have not done so of their own accord” by deploying registered voters to challenge other people’s registrations on a county-by-county basis. And the number of voters affected by this supposed failure is hardly small. In Arizona, Citizen AG found that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes failed to expel “more than 1.2 million inactive and ineligible voters who did not respond to confirmation notices and did not vote in of two subsequent federal elections”; in Pennsylvania, they claimed that number was closer to 278,000 voters.

Why then, given how close these elections are expected to be in Arizona and Pennsylvania, did Citizen AG wait so long to file suit? After all, other similar cases were filed by the Republican National Committee last March, but in Michigan And Nevadathe GOP lost, as I note less than two weeks ago. Similarly, although the Arizona court ordered Fontes to make certain voter registration records available to Citizen AG, Citizen AG was denied the emergency relief it sought in the two cases. Arizona And Pennsylvania – orders that would have forced each state to remove hundreds of thousands, or even more than a million in the case of Pennsylvania, from the voter rolls.

The secretaries of state who responded to these lawsuits say Citizen AG is misinterpreting the data. For example, in the case of Pennsylvania, Secretary of State Al Schmidt supported there is no exact correlation between the notices his office sends to voters who have appeared to move and the voters themselves. On the contrary, “Pennsylvania counties often send multiple notices to the same voter,” he explains. He also notes that Citizen AG assumes the number of inactive voters is “static,” without realizing that it changes daily to reflect events ranging from deaths to re-registration.

One can only guess at the real reason Citizen AG filed these lawsuits late, but it’s possible they never expected to win. On the contrary, they could have brought these proceedings more for their extrajudicial utility. More precisely, I can imagine a universe where After After the election, the documents filed by Citizen AG – which do not in themselves constitute indicators of the merits of a lawsuit, and even less of their chances of success – are released and presented as “evidence” of voter fraud if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in either of these cases. States. Indeed, by touting the alleged importance of the data attached to Citizen AG’s filings, Trump supporters could blame any Harris victory on a group of ineligible voters – perhaps even non-citizen voters – and Democratic officials who were warned their lists were wrong but refused to do so. take action. (Citizen AG founder Ryan Yoder did not immediately respond to my requests for comment.)

The importance of this type of data for those complaining about electoral fraud and/or ineligibility is even greater when considering the more than 60 trials filed by the Donald Trump campaign or other Republican entities and candidates after the 2020 election. Time and time again, these lawsuits complained of voting machine errors and/or deliberate misconduct, but without any evidence to support them. beyond vague witness statements or technical data that did not reflect what was promised it would reveal. This time, rather than relying on ballot manipulation, Republican Party candidates, representatives, and organizations have coalesced around another supposed bogeyman: the ineligible voter. And Citizen AG’s misuse of the states’ own data compilations, which include, as the Arizona judge concluded, “hypothetical calculations based on two-year-old data,” could end up playing a role. major role in post-election stories, or even in new trials.

Of course, the lawsuits could have been truly last resort attempts to stop what Citizen AG considers to be illegal behavior. But something tells me we could see their allegations circulating again as soon as this week.