PA Asks Court To Force Use Of Unverified Voter Registrations

The Pennsylvania Department of State, continuing to defy common sense, is back in court defending its illogical 2018 directive instructing county election boards not to bother verifying mismatched identification at voter registration.

Wannabe voters in Pennsylvania must provide either a driver’s license or a Social Security number when registering to vote. The federal Help America Vote Act, HAVA, requires county election officials to collect these identifying numbers and compare them with government databases. Traditionally in Pennsylvania, when the numbers didn’t match, it meant the voter’s identity could not be verified and the voter registration request was denied.

But in 2018, then-Secretary of the Commonwealth Robert Torres issued a directive prohibiting county elections officials from rejecting voter registration applications just because the information applicants provide doesn’t match the government databases officials use to verify Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. Pennsylvania’s current secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, continues to defend the 2018 directive.

This means potential voters can provide a bogus number on the application form, become a registered voter anyway, and cast a vote. Pennsylvania requires voter ID only the first time a voter shows up in a new district, but that ID can be a current utility bill or the voter registration card the county issues when it approves the registration.

The issue has been challenged in Pennsylvania before and failed, according to Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), the group handling the current case on behalf of Robert Rossman, a Potter County commissioner and member of the Potter County Board of Elections. Previous cases have hinged on the HAVA requirements, but this case has a new argument.

While HAVA requires the collection of Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers, it ultimately defers to state law to decide what happens if those numbers don’t match in the database. RITE argues that state law requires mismatched applications to be rejected.

Act 3 of 2002 prohibits “approval of a voter registration that has not been properly completed, or includes information that is inconsistent,” court papers say. “Instead, under such circumstances, county registration officials — like Commissioner Rossman — are obligated by law to take certain steps to ascertain the necessary information and, if after reasonable effort, the defect cannot be resolved, they are required to reject.”

RITE was in the Commonwealth Court this week with the Pennsylvania Department of State, which argued that Rossman, who administers the county elections as a county commissioner on the election board, does not have standing in the case. Therefore, the state says, the case should be thrown out. Parties await the court’s decision.

“There needs to at least be a follow-up process that the counties undergo to contact the applicant and say, ‘Hey, you know there may be a typo here, or you know we need to verify this information, because what we’re seeing in the official databases is not matching the information you provided us,’” Riemer told The Federalist.

Voter registration is the gateway to participating in the election system, he said. “Errors on the front end of voter registration infect the rest of the system with problems,” Riemer noted. “There is a reason why you’re supposed to register to vote, right? It’s so that the state can verify your eligibility, verify your citizenship, verify that you’re old enough, all these different criteria you need to participate that is all largely handled at the front end.”

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.