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.
Hellbound and Down 