Keystone Today

National election transparency group the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) has sued the Pennsylvania Department of State over its prohibiting the public to view the state’s voter rolls – a right under federal law and the U.S. Constitution, the group says.

The suit was filed last week in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania over allegations that the commonwealth is violating the VRF's First Amendment rights and rights under the National Voter Registration Act to allow public access to voter records.

VRF published the Pennsylvania list online in August 2021, as it has the lists of 31 other states and the District of Columbia, but removed it the midst of the dispute over the records with Department of State elections officials.

Doug Truax, founder and president of Restoration of America, which created and funds VRF, accused the Department of allowing partisan politics to stand in the way of election transparency. Pennsylvania’s Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman was appointed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

"We are not going to allow partisan elections officials to restrict the public's access to election records they pay for," Truax said in a statement. "We have a crisis of confidence in America when it comes to election results and the answer is more transparency, not less."

The group recently won a legal challenge against New Mexico election officials over their opposition to VRF publishing the state rolls online. A federal judge agreed with the group’s First Amendment arguments that voters have a right to inspect the rolls to ensure that the names of deceased voters, duplicate registrations, the registrations of non-citizens, and other irregularities aren’t corrupting the lists.

Pennsylvania reached a court settlement in April 2021 with another voter integrity group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), over the names of more than 21,000 deceased registrants who were on the state’s voter lists a month before the 2020 general election.

PILF spokeswoman Lauren Bowman told Keystone Today that as part of the settlement the Department of State provided PILF with copies of the full voter export at three-month intervals on three separate occasions: May 30, 2021, Aug. 31, 2021 and Nov. 30, 2021.

"The Commonwealth has been complying with the settlement,” Bowman said. “They have even made arrests on some of the deceased voter data we gave them. This settlement was one of the few wins for election integrity in 2020. It is now a lot harder to vote from beyond the grave in Pennsylvania."

She added that one deceased individual who voted was uncovered was Judith Presto.

“Presto voted in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. She died in 2013,” Bowman said. “Closer examination of our data revealed her husband registered and voted for her following her death. We turned this information in to Pennsylvania authorities, which led to the ultimate arrest of her husband.”

Both groups have also cited the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 in their efforts to get states to clean up their voter rolls and make them public. Voter rolls are public documents under the NVRA.

For his part, Truax predicted there will be more lawsuits ahead in the handful of states that prohibit publication of the voter rolls on the internet.

"People on both sides of the political aisle acknowledge our voter rolls are sloppy and inaccurate," he said. “Our ultimate aim is to help clean up those rolls and ensure they are accurate."

The Department of State did not return a request for comment on the VRF lawsuit.