The Independent View: PA Voter System Let Non-Citizens to Register

More than 11,000 Non-Citizens who weren’t Eligible to Register to Vote in Pennsylvania since the Mid-1990s inadvertently Registered because of an oversight in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s Motor-Voter System, PennDOT, a State Department Analysis revealed.

The Thousands of potentially Ineligible Voters on the Rolls prompted the Agency to undertake a process of Confirming Registrations, which resulted in 2,500 People being Removed from the List recently. Of the 2,500 Individuals Removed from the List in the First rounds of Verification by the State Department, 1,915 were Certified Eligible to Vote, 215 Registrations were Canceled, and 286 had already been Canceled.

But about 8,700 of those Registrants remain on the Rolls across 64 Counties, and those Counties will now be tasked with confirming their Eligibility or Removing them from the Rolls. Philadelphia has more than 2,000 Pending. Allegheny County has the Second-Highest number of Ineligible Registrants at 700.

It is not yet clear if any, or how many, of the more than 11,000 Registrants Cast an Illegal Vote in an Election, or if any Illegal Ballots were Cast in the May Primary, which the department Indicated beforehand it was trying to Prevent.

Spokeswoman Wanda Murren said the Agency has “no further information” about Illegal Votes beyond figures released last Fall, when the State Department announced that Non-Citizens may have cast 544 Ballots Illegally out of more than 93 Million Ballots from 2000 through 2017.

Those Illegal Ballots, one in every 172,000 Votes, were revealed after the Ineligible Registrants reported themselves as having Mistakenly Registered, the Department has said.

The Department hired an Expert to Analyze Registration Data and compare Voter Rolls to several other Databases, which yielded a “Responsible” List of Individuals requiring further Confirmation, the Statement said. It wasn’t enough to Match Raw Data from the Registration Database to PennDot Records because those who had an INS Indicator when they Registered may have become Citizens since, and many had.