Yesterday the Justice Department said it planned to intervene in a lawsuit filed in North Carolina to prevent the state from engaging in what the NAACP said was “voter suppression.” The suit claims three North Carolina counties that purged some names from the rolls of voters denied some citizens the right to vote. The civil rights group and the federal government intend to stop the counties from invalidating any more registrations.

But while this fits nicely into a liberal narrative in which Republicans are routinely accused by the left of “rigging” elections by depriving African-Americans of by their rights, the controversy also raises a different question. Why is it okay for people who no longer live at the address where they are registered to be able to vote at their local polling station? Or, to put it more bluntly, is what is going on in North Carolina a battle to prevent voter suppression or one to let dead people vote?

The argument of the NACCP and their Justice Department allies is that the North Carolina counties in question, acting with the help of a conservative group called the Voter Integrity Project, set up a process by which they might determine whether its voter rolls were up to date. Mailings that were returned as “undeliverable” were placed on a list of candidates to be purged. They claim such measures disproportionately impact the poor and African-Americans.

There are reasonable explanations for why a living person who wants to vote might not be at their old address, but if you move there is an obligation to change your registration. But, as common sense tells us, undeliverable mail tends to indicate that the addressee is either no longer living in the jurisdiction or is no longer living anywhere at all.

Purging the rolls of dead people is necessary lest dirty tricksters—and everything we know about our political history and human nature tells us that such people and groups exist—use registrations credited to the dead to nefarious purposes such as voter fraud. The plaintiffs have a point when they say some of the purges might violate a rule that prohibits any such actions within 95 days of an election. But while the Post Office may be guilty of mistakes that made it look like a legal voter was no longer living in their homes, individuals have the right to seek redress and get their registrations reinstated. Others who have moved within the county can similarly have the rights protected by simply asking for their registration to be restored.

Ensuring that government provides a process for redress of mistakes is one thing, but what the Justice Department seems to want is a wholesale prohibition of purges. That will effectively mean that a lot of names belonging to people who are clearly no longer eligible—or among the living—will remain on the rolls.

Liberals are right to argue that the sort of massive voter fraud that might have undermined the integrity of the democratic process has been proven in recent years. But with the federal and most local governments more worried about the dangers of taking dead people off the voter rolls than cheating, it’s hard to be sure that such complacency about voter fraud is justified. The adamant opposition of both the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to common sense provisions like voter ID laws—which are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans and are necessary in every aspect of modern life—isn’t so much motivated by a desire to protect voting rights as it is to prevent government from ensuring the integrity of the vote.

Concern about “rigging” elections is no excuse for candidates to fail to respect the verdict of the people. But so long as the Justice Department is determined to make it harder for localities to enact measures that would prevent cheating, it’s hard to argue that concerns about potential fraud are completely unreasonable, let alone paranoid or racist. Whatever the outcome of the lawsuits in North Carolina, it’s time the Justice Department took a more active interest in ensuring that the valid outcomes of elections are protected with the same vigor that it defends the right to vote.