Front page, Washington Times today: On behalf of the nonpartisan American Civil Rights Union, three former U.S. Justice Department attorneys filed lawsuits last week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi seeking an injunction to compel election officials in the two counties to purge all people no longer eligible to cast ballots. . . . Mr. Adams accused the Obama administration’s Justice Department and the attorney general of failing to properly enforce federal voting rights law, which “forces private parties like ACRU to go in and do the job Eric Holder ought to be doing.” Mr. Adams said Jefferson Davis County was targeted because of voter violations there, including at least one case where a ballot was cast by a dead person. In Walthall, he said, the gap between registered and eligible voters was too big to ignore. . . . Mr. Adams pointed to Virginia, which he says has an aggressive and effective voter purging policy, as an example for others to follow. “Malice is not an element to a [voter] violation,” he said. “What matters is whether or not you’re doing your job keeping the rolls clean, and it’s pretty obvious to anyone who can do math, the answer is these places have failed.”
“While the Obama administration pushes to stop people from being purged from voter rolls, a conservative-leaning group is pressing localities to clean up their lists — including suing two Mississippi counties where more names appear on the rolls than there are eligible voters.
But the ACRU says Mississippi, as well as counties and states across the country, can be doing much more to fix their voting roll problems.