Keystone Today

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered officials with the Department of State last week to allow the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which specializes in voter integrity debates, to inspect records showing how many foreign nationals voted in Pennsylvania elections going back decades.

The non-citizen voting registration allegedly occurred through what the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation told PILF was a “glitch” in the system that allows those who obtain or update their drivers’ licenses to register to vote.

Department officials at first denied PILF’s request to inspect the records to assess the extent of the noncitizen voting, but Judge Christopher Conner of the U.S.  District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that PILF is entitled to these documents under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

“Transparency in how states determine voter eligibility [the vital bedrock of our electoral system] is generally paramount,” Conner wrote in his March 31 opinion.

In the lawsuit, PILF also sought the voting history of more than 1,100 noncitizen registrants who self-reported their ineligibility and requested cancellation of their voter registrations.

“Previously, after the court rejected the commonwealth’s request to dismiss the suit,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement, “the commonwealth shared the list of names with PILF, in what the court described as a ‘veritable sea of black ink’ that contained no voting histories. The court ruled that the commonwealth must disclose these voting histories too.”

Finally, the court ruled that if states maintain records for longer than the two-year requirement by the NVRA, then they are required to also disclose these records if they are relevant to a public records request.

“This is monumental victory for election integrity,” Adams said. “Americans have a right to documents exposing government malfeasance and noncitizens being registered and even voting. Pennsylvania spent four years fighting transparency and trying to hide their mistakes. It is sad that transparency in Pennsylvania elections had to be enforced by a court.”