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

Pennsylvania’s voter registration rolls — and voter lists in other states — tend to be targets of election misinformation, especially where accusations about the potential for mass voter fraud are concerned.

Voter registration lists do need to be maintained and updated under federal law to help remove the potential for voter fraud, but sometimes statistics and figures are thrown out that suggests voter rolls are rife with problems like double registrations and dead people.

A Feb. 27 bill proposing an update to Pennsylvania’s voter list maintenance by state Sen. Cris Dush, R-25, of Jefferson County, included a few statistics to underscore the point that the state’s voter rolls are outdated.

“Pennsylvania’s voter rolls are chronically and demonstrably outdated.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 non-citizens may unwittingly be registered to vote, and recent reviews have found as many as 80,000 duplicate voter registrations,” Dush’s Enhancing Voter List Maintenance bill memo states.

The USA Today Network reviewed the duplicate regisration estimate that also appeared in another bill memo by Dush to add mental competancy and "exclusive registration" requirements to become a voter in Pennsylvania.

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The other figures in that quote deserve more context as well. After all, these bills could ultimately affect how voters are added and — more importantly — how they’re removed in accordance with federal laws.

Are Pennsylvania’s voter rolls ‘dirty’?

Maintaining a voter registration list of more than 8.68 million people, like in Pennsylvania, is not an easy task, but it's a job that's mandated to every state by the National Voter Rights Act of 1993, or NVRA.

The law allows states to remove voters who have died, moved out of the area they've registered to vote in or voters who have not participated in at least two consecutive federal elections and not responded to mailed requests to verify their address.

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Any U.S. citizen over the age of 18 who has lived in their voting precinct for at least 30 days can become a registered voter in Pennsylvania, as long as it's more than 15 days before the next election.

The NVRA also requires states participate in a biannual survey by the federal Election Assistance Commission that catalogues how its roles have changed between federal eletions, roughly a two year period, which is published online at www.eac.gov.

Deaths have actually been higher than the 125,000 average Dush pulled from the Department of Health's Vital Events Registry webpage, with at least 135,000 Pennsylvanians dying since 2017 and some much higher spikes from the coronavirus pandemic.

About 155,457 Pennsylvanians died in 2021 and another 147,124 died in 2022.

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In 2022, Pennsylvania reported to the EAC that the state had removed 229,763 deceased individuals from the voter rolls. That's almost double the average deaths quoted in the memo and roughly 75% of all deaths reported in 2021 and 2022.

As for the state-to-state migration estimate, Pennsylvania actually removed 392,536 voters from its rolls for moving out of their voting areas in 2022. That's about 74,536 more voters removed than the 318,000 who moved between 2021 and 2022.

The state also removed about 360,132 voters who skipped at least two federal elections in 2022.

All told, the state removed almost 1 million voters from its rolls two years ago. The bulk of those removals were for reasons that are also underscored in Dush's bill to show that the lists are "chronically and demonstrably outdated."

Dush also reference an estimate of non-citizen voters in his memo, and there doesn't appear to be a satistic to readily counter that claim.

The "tens of thousands of non-citizens" estimate comes from a 2017 hearing where current Secretary of State Al Schmidt, then a Philadelphia councilman, estimated as many as 100,000 non-citizens may have registered to vote between 2006 and 2017.

That was just a rough statewide estimate that came after the city issued a report that found 220 non-citizen, legal residents self-reported that they had registered to vote. About 75% said they registered to vote when getting or updating a license and about 90 said they had actually voted.

Dush did not respond to a request for comment as of Thursday afternoon. The Pennsylvania state department declined to comment on either of Dush’s bill memos.

Can Pennsylvania do better cleaning up its voter rolls?

If the EAC data is any indication, the counties seem to be mostly keeping up with removing inactive, deceased and other ineligible voters.

Voter lists will likely never be perfectly clean since they are constantly in flux, however, former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said via email there are at least a few areas where change could help.

Boockvar recently launched Athena Strategies, a non-partisan consulting firm that advises and collaborates with organizations and government officials with a goal of strengthening election security across the country.

“One of the best ways to ensure the most accurate voter rolls is to provide for and expand automatic voter registration (AVR) opportunities, which the governor’s office recently established for PennDOT transactions in Pennsylvania,” Boockvar said.

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Gov. Josh Shapiro announced the implementation of AVR in September, allowing eligible state residents who are receiving new or renewed driver licenses and ID cards to be automatically taken through the voter registration application process unless they opt against it.

Boockvar said one of the side benefits of AVR is that the automatic updates in changes of address will probably cut down on duplicate voters as well.

More funding for “underpaid, understaffed, and overworked” election workers will also go a long way in ensuring the state’s rolls are as clean as possible, Boockvar added.

Election workers have been frequently targeted as potential accomplices in conspiracy theories about mass fraud, both in and out of the state.

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Threats and harassment have helped drive a national shortage of experienced election workers and that high turnover has already hit Pennsylvania in the form of ballot shortages during elections in Delaware, York and Luzerne counties.

“Election officials are incredibly dedicated and work tirelessly to carry out the constantly expanding processes they must utilize to administer and secure our elections,” Boockvar said. “To enable officials to carry out voter registration list maintenance most effectively, we need to fund election security and administration effectively.”

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Voter rolls appear regularly maintained in PA despite top GOP claims