Battleground Pennsylvania appears to have thousands of “shady” voter registrations on its rolls, according to a review by an election integrity watchdog. And Pennsylvania’s problems speak to a wider issue of dirty voter files, the reluctance of state elections officials to clean them up, and what that all means for the principle of free and fair elections.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) on Thursday said it sent a formal letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt detailing “alarming findings” from its review of the Keystone State’s voter files.
PILF Research Director Logan Churchwell said the examination found more than 19,000 potential interstate duplicate registrations, thousands of same-address duplicates, and hundreds of records with placeholder and fake dates of birth.
“The Pennsylvania voter roll is riddled with errors that undermine the integrity of the election process,” said PILF President J. Christian Adams in a press release. “Our findings in Pennsylvania are consistent with patterns we have exposed in other states like Maine and New Jersey.”
As of this summer, Pennsylvania’s voter rolls contained 19,489 registrants with matched voter registration files in second states, according to the watchdog’s review. Nearly 10,000 of those duplicates came from Florida, another 5,700 were from New York, and 2,400-plus in California. The review also included matches in New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio and Maine.
“The Foundation’s relational database was designed to house voter registration rolls from every state to run comparative analytics,” Churchwell wrote in the letter to Schmidt. Copied on the letter are Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, and Maureen Riordan, acting voting section chief at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Churchwell said the tracking process uses secondary or mailing address data stored by the state of Pennsylvania to follow the registrant to a second address to check for a matching registration. The process is then reversed by “checking other states’ mailing address data, which lead to addresses in Pennsylvania. A registrant is flagged if names and birthdates perfectly match. “
The foundation’s review found 3,170 instances of duplicate registrants where variations in name spelling or nicknames have uncovered duplications at the same residential addresses. PILF’s review also captured a sample of 79 intercounty duplicates.
And the foundation’s latest tally finds at least 321 registrants flagged for having placeholder or false dates of birth.
“As an example, a registrant showing to be born ‘7/15/1905’ in Philadelphia is still alive and well, because their real birthdate is July 15, 1951,” Churchwell wrote. “The Foundation does not have a full accounting of all incorrect dates of birth within the active voter roll.”
The letter seeks a meeting with Pennsylvania’s secretary of state to go over the report’s findings.
“We are urging Secretary Schmidt to take immediate action to clean up these rolls and restore public confidence,” Adams said.
‘Next to Nothing’
Last week, Adams testified before a congressional hearing titled “Clean Rolls, Secure Elections: Reviewing Voter List Maintenance Standards”. The election-integrity advocate addressed the systemic failures in maintaining voter rolls and called for stronger standards.
He began his testimony with a question for Congress to ponder: What does Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) mean when it requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official list of eligible voters?”
“According to federal courts, unfortunately, now it means next to nothing,” Adams told members of the House Committee on Administration. “That isn’t what Congress intended in 1993” when it passed the compromise bill. He said federal courts have decided the section means “to find the mere existence of a list-maintenance program is what matters, not the program’s effectiveness.”
That interpretation is antithetical to the concept of election integrity, watchdogs say.
‘Inconsistent and Arbitrary’
PILF has filed lawsuits challenging dirty voters rolls in Maine, Oregon, Hawaii and elsewhere. Some states provide limited access to public inspection of their voter rolls, a clear violation of the NVRA. Hawaii, for instance, requires requestors to seek parts of the voter list file from individual county clerks who may arbitrarily deny the request, according to the foundation. In an action filed in May, PILF argued that blue state Hawaii’s “voting record practices are inconsistent and arbitrary.”
“While the state restricts access to the public, it freely provides the same voter data to political parties and other favored entities, further undermining its legal position,” the foundation states in a press release.
Hawaii elections officials “work continuously to uphold the accuracy of Hawaii’s voter registration rolls,” according to a “Rumors vs. Facts” section on the state Office of Elections website. But the information page acknowledges that the County Elections Divisions that manage the list-maintenance process must follow the federal NVRA to “determine the removal of a voter from the voter registration rolls.” And that, once again, is a matter of interpretation. Sometimes the interpretations are not reasonable — and run counter to election integrity.
‘A Reliable Warning Signal’
The Department of Justice is seeking registration file information from several states with histories of messy voter rolls, including Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Left-wing election officials and liberal voter advocacy groups are up in arms, insisting the effort and President Donald Trump’s election integrity executive order issued in March is illegal. As Stateline reported, the DOJ letters ask election officials to detail their voter registration procedures and what they do to identify duplication registrations and registrants ineligible to vote, including individuals convicted of felonies and the deceased. And they ask state elections officials how they screen noncitizens attempting to register, a growing problem despite denials by left-leaning news organization such as Stateline.
The story quotes Colorado leftist Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who insists that whatever “the Trump administration tries to pull is very likely to be unsuccessful.”
“With that said, do I think they are trying to undermine our elections at large in this country? Absolutely,” Griswold told the publication. It’s a curious comment from a woman who did indeed undermine our elections when she vehemently advocated for Trump to be removed from Colorado’s primary ballot, a position the liberal-led state Supreme Court agreed with but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected in a stern rebuke. Also curious is the fact that Stateline didn’t mention that fact in its story, which was filled with some of the more left-leaning elections-law “experts” in the country.
Griswold also claimed that Trump is “continuing to try to rewrite the 2020 election and destabilize the ’26 and ’28 elections.” She made that charge as state and congressional Democrats have repeatedly opposed extremely popular election-integrity initiatives such as voter ID and stronger U.S. citizenship requirements to register to vote.
The real threat facing the midterm and presidential elections ahead, Adams said, are dirty voter rolls and elections officials who refuse to clean them up.
“Poor list hygiene is a reliable warning signal for future list maintenance problems,” he said. “The Public Interest Legal Foundation discovered nearly a quarter of the New York statewide voter roll was missing Social Security numbers. Left unchecked, this means millions of records cannot be matched to the Social Security Death Index for reliable verification.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
