Does PA have 80K duplicate voter registration on its rolls? We break down inflated estimate

Claims that Pennsylvania has 80,000 duplicate voter registrations cited twice recently by a state lawmaker are missing important context, according to the researcher behind the estimate.

The estimate first appeared in a Jan. 4 post reviewing voter data in seven states by German-based identity resolution company Tilores, which appeared to grab the attention of Jefferson County Sen. Cris Dush as his office included the figure in two separate bill memos related to the state’s voter rolls.

One bill seeks to add requirements to voter registration “to protect the voting rights of individuals deemed mentally incompetent by a legal authority” and for “exclusive registration,” requiring new voters to prove a prior voter registration is canceled before they could register in Pennsylvania.

The second bill is for “enhancing list maintenance” for Pennsylvania’s voter rolls, which the memo describes as "chronically and demonstrably outdated.”

In both memos, the duplicate voter estimate from Tilores was referenced to underscore alleged problems with the state’s voter rolls.

"Pennsylvania’s voter rolls are chronically and demonstrably outdated. Every year, some 125,000 Pennsylvanians pass away. In 2021 alone, some 318,000 people moved out of state. Our current Secretary of State previously testified that tens of thousands of noncitizens may unwittingly be registered to vote, and recent reviews have found as many as 80,000 duplicate voter registrations," Dush wrote.

That duplicate registraiton estimate, however, has since been walked back by original post’s author, Tilores CEO and co-founder Steven Renwick, who said in a Jan. 16 post that the U.S. “doesn’t really have a problem with duplicate voters.”

Get ready to vote in April primary: Everything you need to know before April's PA primary in Bucks County

A link to the new story with the text “Update: actually, there is less of a problem than we thought. Or actually, there is a different problem” is at the top of the original article linked in Dush’s memos.

“It has a problem with partisan politics forcing Republican states to make completely illogical decisions to reduce the quality of their voting data,” Renwick added.

While his analysis included about 49.5 million rows of voter registration data from Georgia, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Arkansas, Renwick said in an email Friday that even that level of publicly available data is “relatively shallow” and means “a certain false positive rate” for identifying duplicate registrations.

“The number of duplicates we detect is probably higher than the number of ‘true’ duplicates,” Renwick said.

What are duplicate voter registrations?

In the Tilores analysis, a duplicate voter registration is any voter who appears to have registered at least twice, either in at least two separate states or they appear more than once within the same state.

It wasn’t originally published in January, but Renwick said there were approximately 13,600 duplicate voter registrations within Pennsylvania and another 66,000 voters with a registration in Pennsylvania and at least one other state.

It’s not a federal crime to be registered to vote in more than one state, but the “exclusive registration” requirement in one of Dush’s Enhancing Voter Registration Criteria could make it a crime at the state level if passed.

While Dush's office did ask for more time to respond to a request for comment for this story in an email Monday, the Senator did not respond by press time Thursday.

More: A Pa. county defied the courts to hunt for 2020 voter fraud. Here's what happened next.

Henry Olsen, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said any changes to state laws have to conform to federal requirements and especially for any bill that has “prerequisites for voter registration.”

While Olsen said both of Dush’s memos seemed “like good ideas to marginally improve the accuracy of voter lists,” the registration criteria bill’s mental competency component was concerning.

“It’s one thing to have systems where courts send lists of people judged mentally incompetent to be removed from voting lists and another to effectively prove mental competency at the time of registration. The Senator’s proposal may run afoul of federal law, depending on how it is phrased and what it requires,” Olsen said.

Likewise, for Dush’s bill to fix alleged inaccuracies on the state’s voter rolls. Olsen said the state should do everything within its power to maintain its voter rolls but a step too far “could be very counterproductive and discourage voting.”

More: Are PA voter rolls clean? How Nearly 1M voters were removed two years ago

Federal law requires voter rolls be maintained

There are federal laws that require states to regularly maintain their voter rolls and clean them of deceased or ineligible voters to prevent potential voter fraud.

The National Voter Rights Act of 1993 (NVRA) generally allows registered voters to skip two federal elections before they can be removed from the rolls, and states are required to attempt to contact those voters by mail between those elections.

Marian Schnieder, senior policy counsel for Voting Rights with the ACLU of PA, echoed Olsen’s concerns about mental competency, but added that proposing voters prove they aren’t registered elsewhere would be difficult.

“While we have not seen actual bill language, Sen. Dush's proposal seems unworkable at best and an attempt to dampen turnout among voters who may be unsure whether they are registered in another state,” Schneider said Monday.

Previously the state’s deputy secretary for Elections and Administration from 2015 to 2017, Schneider was also highly skeptical of Renwick’s admittedly high estimates and the condition of Pennsylvania’s voter rolls.

Cleaning voter rolls in Pennsylvania

“The claimed numbers of duplicate registrations are highly questionable, especially if they are within Pennsylvania,” Schneider said. “Pennsylvania's voter registration system has protections built into it to prevent duplicates within the state.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of State oversees the voter rolls, but the Board of Elections in each of the state’s 67 counties handle maintenance.

If a voter moved from Bucks County to Lehigh County but filled out a new voter registration form rather than requesting to update their existing registration, Schneider said the two counties would soon be communicating with each other about the possible duplicate registration.

As part of the NVRA, all states must require their departments of motor vehicles to provide citizens the option to register to vote when conducting business, like renewing a driver’s license.

That same former Bucks County voter could also automatically update their registration when they update their driver’s license or other state issued ID.

State law also requires that county election boards perform a review of their voter lists at least once a year.

Those are some of the internal processes the state uses, but Pennsylvania is also part of what Schneider and Renwick say is “the best tool available” to find and remove duplicates.

That tool, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonproift and nonpartisan group made up of state election officials from 24 states and Washington, D.C., provides information to help clean voter rolls.

Renwick actually posted his updated story after Tilores and ERIC discussed his first blog post and compared data, which is when Renwick said ERIC “has an advantage” in identifying double registrations because it has access to information from national databases and its member states.

Pennsylvania has been a member of the group since 2016, though ERIC is not a service the state is required to use and current state law prohibits using ERIC to remove deceased voters.

Within 60 days of the death of a person over the age of 18, the state’s Department of Health provides their name and address to the local county election board. The counties can also use newspaper obituaries and information from the Register of Wills to find deceased voters.

Bucks Man created fake superPAC in 2020: Langhorne man admits creating a phony super PAC in 2020 election in PA

2020 election claims lead to backlash, calls for PA change

ERIC has been mostly a noncontroversial group since it was founded in 2012, but the nonprofit has come under fire after the unfounded claims of mass voter fraud that followed the 2020 election and persist today.

The backlash against ERIC appears to have started with a January 2022 post on The Gateway Pundit falsely claiming the group was funded by George Soros as a way to drive left-wing voter registrations.

Nine Republican-led states have left the group since 2022, including Virginia, one of ERIC’s founding members, which cut ties last May. Iowa left last June, when Gov. Kim Reynolds approved several changes to the state’s election laws.

There have been multiple reports since the ERIC exodus that those states have faced a number of obstacles in cleaning their voter rolls, including paying tens of thousands of dollars more for just some of the data they received through ERIC.

Last March, Dush and state Sen. Jarrett Coleman introduced a bill to cut ties with ERIC over “mass voter registration efforts … privacy concerns and partisan leanings.”

“ERIC is a very good system, and in our opinion, it would be ludicrous for a state to leave the consortium,” Renwick said. “Really, every single US state should be joining as the more states that join, the better the duplicate rate detection gets.”

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Bills questioning PA voter rolls, calls for reform based on bad estimate