A conservative activist and voter fraud alarmist is facing a federal lawsuit Thursday over dubious allegations of massive voter fraud in Virginia. A civil rights group and four Virginia voters filed a suit against J. Christian Adams and the legal outfit he runs, alleging that Adams and the group violated state and federal law when it accused thousands of Virginians, many of them eligible citizens, of voting illegally.

Adams, a former member of President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission, is the president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which in 2016 and 2017 published two reports alleging that thousands of “aliens” had committed felony voter fraud in Virginia and, in indexes to the reports, published personally identifiable information about those people. But many of Adams’ would-be criminals are in fact eligible voters, including all of the plaintiffs.

In the lawsuit, a local Virginia chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and four individuals allege that Adams and his legal firm violated state defamation laws, as well as federal civil rights laws that protect against voter intimidation. The lawsuit alleges that the reports Adams published are a form of voter intimidation against the people named in the report, and put them at risk by publishing their personal information alongside the allegation that they are felons.

The two reports, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II” used a flawed methodology in order to claim that more than than 5,500 non-citizens had registered to vote, and that 1,852 of those people cast nearly 7,500 ballots over last few decades. The reports claimed that PILF had obtained the names of thousands of voters who had likely committed felonies by registering to vote and casting a ballot. The reports’ indexes included names of these accused individuals, along with personal information including home addresses, phone numbers, and even some Social Security numbers (which were later redacted).

The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus blasted proposed changes to Democratic "superdelegate" rules that would limit their ability to vote on the first ballot for the party's presidential nominees.

In a letter to Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez dated Monday, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond wrote on behalf of "many" of his colleagues in the caucus to urge him to withdraw support of the changes to be voted on at the party's meeting at the end of the month.

"There should be enough room in the process to include the perspective of local party activists and officials, and Members of Congress. One group should not be harmed at the expense of the other," Richmond wrote. "Passage of the reforms in their current form would disenfranchise elected officials for no substantive reason and would create unnecessary competition between those elected and their constituents."

The proposed plan -- known as the "third way plus" option -- does not allow superdelegates to vote at the convention for the presidential nominee on the first ballot unless a candidate has been certified to have earned a majority of the entire convention through pledged delegates only. This ensures superdelegates could not change the outcome of the nomination process on the first ballot, which detractors of the plan point out has never happened since they were created in the 1980s.