A nonprofit law firm run by a former member of President Donald Trump's now-disbanded voter fraud commission is suing Allegheny County for its alleged failure to maintain its voter rolls.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which J. Christian Adams is president and general counsel, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday accusing the county of violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by not undertaking a "reasonable effort" to remove the names of ineligible voters from its registration lists.
Under state and federal law, the county is supposed to remove voters who have moved out of state, who have died or who have requested to be removed in writing.
The Indiana-based law firm, though, claims that its review of the county's voter list — provided to the foundation last October — found, among other things, more than 3,700 sets of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate voter registration records; more than 1,500 deceased voters whose registrations should have been canceled, but remain active; more than 1,500 registrants with dates-of-birth listed more than 100 years ago; and more than 7,400 records that contain erroneous information stemming from the county's failure to correctly process name changes, including by way of marriage.
It filed suit, it said, because the county, by not ensuring that deceased people or those who have moved are not active registrants, is "impairing its essential and core mission of fostering compliance with federal election laws, promotion of election integrity and avoiding vote dilution when ineligible voters participate in elections.”
Named as defendants are David Voye, manager of elections, county Executive Rich Fitzgerald, county Councilwoman Bethany Hallam and county Councilman Sam DeMarco — who make up the board of elections and are responsible for supervising list maintenance.
The foundation is asking the court to declare the defendants in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, and to order the county to immediately investigate the cases of potentially inaccurate registrations it identified, as well as to remove confirmed ineligible registrants from the rolls prior to the April 28 primary election.
Mr. Voye, in a statement, said that while it's policy of the county to decline comment on pending legal matters, he wanted to address the lawsuit publicly because it concerns the conduct of elections.
Insisting that the county's foremost concern is to protect voting rights, Mr. Voye said each citizen registered to vote gets one vote, and "there are no allegations [in the lawsuit] that anything to the contrary has occurred."
"The allegations in this lawsuit will be reviewed and addressed as necessary consistent with all applicable federal and state laws," Mr. Voye said. "As is always the case with voter registration list maintenance, the utmost care will be taken to ensure that no one is disenfranchised.”
Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said that while list maintenance is important, "it is equally important that duly registered voters not be incorrectly removed from the voting rolls, causing unsuspecting voters to be disenfranchised at the polls on election day."
Mr. Walczak said Allegheny County removed nearly 70,000 inactive voters from its rolls a month ago, and claimed the foundation did not account for how many of the alleged defective registrations were addressed in that effort.
"The ACLU is concerned that this lawsuit is an effort to force Allegheny County to purge voters more quickly and even haphazardly, jeopardizing the status of eligible voters," Mr. Walczak said, adding that the organization intends to defend the right of all registered voters in Pennsylvania to vote in the 2020 elections.
Mr. Adams has routinely claimed there is evidence of voter fraud across the U.S., and, according to a late 2017 report by NBC News, has spent years suing counties in an effort to get them to purge their voter rolls. In 2017, he was named to Mr. Trump's Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, an effort scrutinized by voting rights advocates and election law experts and eventually disbanded because states refused to provide it with information, according to the White House.
This is not the first time this year that Allegheny County's voter rolls have been subject to scrutiny by activist groups. The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch threatened legal action in January over the county's allegedly inaccurate rolls, though its findings were disputed.
In December, an audit of the state's voter roll maintenance efforts by Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale found that Allegheny County's rolls included about 42,000 active records that should have been placed into inactive status after five years of inactivity, a figure that Mr. Voye said was probably correct, but based on data from 2018, a year in which there were five elections in the county that resulted in some list maintenance activities being "pushed back." State and federal law mandates that voter records cannot be altered within 90 days of an election.
First Published: February 26, 2020, 12:53 a.m.
