Mississippi is joining eight other states in a lawsuit attempting to block efforts by the administration of President Joe Biden to make voter registration easier.
Gov. Tate Reeves, Secretary of State Michael Watson and Attorney General Lynn Fitch — all Republicans who compose the Mississippi Election Commission — filed the lawsuit. They oppose an executive order issued by Biden instructing federal agencies to develop strategies to expand voter registration efforts and to report those strategies to the White House. In addition, the executive order mandates federal agencies to work with states on voter registration, such as providing efforts to register to vote at military offices.
The lawsuit claims that the federal effort was not transparent. And other lawsuits by conservative groups claim the executive order is unconstitutional because voter registration efforts are the purview of the states.
Watson, who oversees elections in Mississippi, has been critical of the Biden executive order for about two years.
“From the day this unlawful Executive Order (EO 14019) was signed, my team and I had hoped it was another Biden administration word salad with no action,” Watson said in a news release. “Unfortunately, that was not the case. In 2022, several secretaries of state and I sent a letter to the administration asking them to stand down.”
The Biden administration has not commented on the numerous lawsuits filed by states and other right wing groups.
But during an online interview, Lisa Danetz, an adviser for the Brennen Center for Justice, a national non-profit that promotes voter access, said the order “directs federal agencies to provide access to voter registration application opportunities and reliable voting information when eligible citizens are already interacting with the federal government. The order also aims to improve access in other ways, such as by requiring the government to examine obstacles to voting for people with disabilities.”
But Fitch said the executive order is a partisan effort to impact elections.
“We fully support encouraging voter registration and promoting an engaged electorate,” Fitch said. “But putting the full weight of the Oval Office behind an effort first developed by partisan activist groups and then hiding the agency activities from public scrutiny goes too far. The law does not allow it. Mississippi will not stand for it.”
Reeves said, “Federal agencies should be prioritizing their core duties, not acting as an extension of the Democratic National Committee.”
The lawsuit comes as speculation mounts that former President Donald Trump might attempt to challenge the outcome of the upcoming 2024 election as he did after losing the 2020 contest to Biden.
In 2020, Fitch, supported by Reeves, joined an unsuccessful lawsuit attempting to throw out the votes of millions of primarily Black Americans in four states.
The lawsuit maintained with no evidence that Biden had “less that one in a quadrillion” chance of winning the four states that helped swing the election for Biden.
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