In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ Nos. 20-2815 & 20-2816 LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF INDIANA, INC., et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. HOLLI SULLIVAN, in her official capacity as Secretary of State of Indiana, et al., Defendants-Appellants. ____________________ Appeals from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division. Nos. 1:17-cv-02897 & 1:17-cv-03936 — Tanya Walton Pratt, Chief Judge. ____________________ ARGUED APRIL 22, 2021 — DECIDED JULY 19, 2021 ____________________ Before WOOD, BRENNAN, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges. WOOD, Circuit Judge. In this case, we return to the question whether Indiana’s procedures for maintaining its official list of registered voters comply with federal law. On its first trip here, Indiana was defending Act 442 (as its voter-registration law at the time was called). See Common Cause Indiana v. Law- son, 937 F.3d 944 (7th Cir. 2019) (“Common Cause I”). We con- cluded that Act 442 was preempted by the National Voter 2 Nos. 20-2815 & 20-2816 Registration Act (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. §§ 20501–20511, because it allowed the state to remove a registered voter from its offi- cial list without following the procedures mandated by the NVRA. See 52 U.S.C. § 20507(d). Now Indiana is here again with a new law, Act 334. Indiana contends that Act 334 elimi- nates the provisions we found problematic in Act 442. And to a degree, this is true. But what Act 334 took with the left hand, it gave away with the right, and the net result is continued inconsistency with the NVRA. Therefore, we find that por- tions of it, too, are preempted by federal law. I Our story begins in 2017, with the passage of Senate En- rolled Act 442 (Act 442). Act 442 adopted an “aggressive new strategy” for cleansing Indiana’s voter rolls of people who the state suspected were no longer qualified to vote there. Com- mon Cause I, 937 F.3d at 946. Act 442 allowed Indiana election officials to remove a voter from the state’s voter rolls automat- ically (meaning without directly contacting the person in question) based on information acquired through a third- party database known as “Crosscheck.” Crosscheck provided the Indiana Election Division—the central election authority in the state—with the voter lists of multiple states. Once the Election Division received this information, it applied certain “confidence factors” to the data, assigning points when cer- tain data fields relating to an out-of-state voter and Indiana voter matched. When a voter’s records exceeded a specified point threshold, the Election Division forwarded the voter’s Crosscheck data to county election officials. (In Indiana, county election officials maintain the official voter rolls. See Ind. Code § 3-7-38.2-1 to -2.) Act 442 then required county of- ficials to determine whether (1) the Indiana voter and the out- Nos. 20-2815 & 20-2816 3 of-state voter were the same person, and (2) the matching reg- istration in the second state postdated the registration in Indi- ana. See Ind. Code § 3-7-38.2-5(d) (2018). If these two criteria …
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