An activist group is suing Pa over voter registration

A Florida-based group is questioning the eligibility of more than 277,000 Pennsylvania voters in a new federal lawsuit, part of a multistate push to challenge voter rolls ahead of the presidential election.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt suggests many of those records should have been removed from the rolls two years ago and is asking a federal judge to compel the community to turn over the voter records it seeks.

The organization behind the legal challenge, Citizen AG, has targeted several swing states including Pennsylvania for its mass purge of voter rolls, which election denial groups and allies of former President Donald Trump have argued are riddled with flaws.

However, voting rights groups said such efforts to cancel or challenge registrations are largely aimed at sowing doubt in the electoral system and potentially intensifying efforts to challenge race results.

“These lawsuits that say states have to take people off the voter rolls are setting the stage for people to challenge election results they may not like this fall,” said Andrew Garber, an adviser in the Voting Rights Program at Brennan Center for Justice.

Marian Schneider, Senior Voting Rights Counsel for ACLU of Pennsylvaniasaid it suspects the group’s numbers are flawed, noting that the lawsuit cites data from a two-year-old report when trying to back up its claims. The organization’s unfamiliarity with Pennsylvania election processes is made even more apparent by the fact that it named Schmidt only in the process, when the 67 counties are responsible for maintaining voter registration rolls, she said.

Schneider said Pennsylvanians should be “confident that our elections are free, fair and secure” and that county officials are diligent in maintaining voter rolls.

“I would call these types of suits … being tacky suits,” she said.

Nationally, these types of efforts have been largely unsuccessful, Garber said. However, they eat up the time and attention of election officials who can’t afford to spare anyone as they prepare for Tuesday.

counties across Pennsylvania they were swept in this wave of activist challenges to voter registration and vote-by-mail applications, largely based on sources of information deemed unreliable for assessing eligibility.

For example, Citizen AG asked people in swing states to compare voter rolls with EagleAI, a system that draw from publicly available datato identify specific names for the challenge. Experts said this method of targeting ineligible voters is problematic and inaccurate.

The lawsuit filed earlier this week alleges that more than 277,000 people are still on the Commonwealth’s voter registration rolls who did not respond to notices sent before the 2020 general election. Those voters were marked as inactive on the state’s rolls, and the plaintiffs they argue that they should be removed entirely unless they have been reactivated by participating in either of the last two federal elections.

But the group acknowledges in its own filing that without additional registrations, “there is no way to distinguish which of the 277,768 currently registered to vote are active, eligible voters and how many of the 277,768 should have been removed from the voter lists. “

The group wants a judge to block non-responding and inactive voters from voting on Nov. 5 unless they first go through the steps required by law to vote after not responding to a notice. Schneider called the request “nonsense” because inactive voters already have to go through this process, which usually involves filling out an address verification form.

In addition, Citizens AG wants the courts to order Pennsylvania to administer an “adequate” list maintenance program going forward.

The group also alleged that Pennsylvania officials are violating federal law by failing to comply with their Oct. 4 open records request for voter history — information the plaintiffs say they need to find out how many of the approximately 277,000 voters have reactivated. records during the 2020 or 2022 elections.

The State Department responded that it could not provide the data immediately and needed an additional 30 days to compile it, court records show, but lawyers for Citizen AG said they do not agree to the extension and are asking a federal judge to compel Pennsylvania to he teaches them. .

State elections officials did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

The group, founded by an attorney who also fought the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, filed the complaint in collaboration with Anthony Golembiewski, an Allegheny County voter who is a member of Citizen AG, according to the lawsuit.

Golembiewski, a GOP committeeman, led a push to remove thousands of names from Allegheny County voter rolls based on U.S. Postal Service change-of-address records, according to a WESA report.

Experts say these change-of-address records are not a reliable way to determine a voter’s eligibility because someone could have mail sent for a number of reasons, such as for a temporary move while serving in the military or attending college .

Bethany Rodgers is an investigative journalist for the USA TODAY Network’s Pennsylvania Capital Bureau.