Keystone Today

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who recently announced his candidacy for governor, has criticized Senate Republicans for voting to subpoena information from the state’s voter registration system but said nothing about a request by Auditor General’s Eugene DePasquale, a fellow Democrat, for the same information in 2019.

State Sen. Cris Dush (R-Jefferson), who chairs the Intergovernmental Operations Committee investigating the 2020 general election and the 2021 primaries, wrote in a recent commentary that Democrats have made “wild accusations” about what will happen with the data.

“The attorney general claims the subpoena will compromise the privacy rights of Pennsylvanians,” Dush wrote. “Senate Democrats said private voting information would be released and personal information would be exposed. None of this could be further from the truth.”

Dush said the reason his committee subpoenaed the information was to cross-match and verify whether the voter registration system has duplicate voters, dead voters and illegal voters.

“Former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale asked for the same information for the same purpose in 2019, when he documented major concerns with the SURE (Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors) system and the existence of hundreds of thousands of problem records in the system,” Dush wrote.

In 2019 DePasquale’s office found, among other things, instances of duplicate driver's license records and mistaken dates on birth and voter registrations. The audit also found more than 50,000 cases of potentially inaccurate voter records including instances of “potentially bad data or sloppy record-keeping.”

The audit was far from complete. In his final report, DePasquale wrote that the Department of State’s “denial of access to critical documents and excessive redaction of documentation results in the DAG (auditor general) being unable to fully achieve three of the eight audit objectives.” He further wrote that “DAG was unable to establish with any degree of reasonable assurance that the SURE system is secure and that Pennsylvania voter registration records are complete, accurate and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations and related guidelines.”

The SURE system was targeted for improvement under sweeping election reform legislation approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly in June. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed the  bill, and Shapiro supported the decision. 

The legislation also provided for voter ID, and signature matching for mail-in ballots – provisions that Pennsylvania voters support in overwhelming numbers, according to polls.