(Alexandria, VA) – April 15, 2021: Today, Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) President J. Christian Adams testified before the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee on stakeholder election integrity.
In prepared remarks, Adams noted that this month PILF reached a settlement with the Pennsylvania Secretary of State to remove over 20,000 dead registrants from the voter rolls.
“This month, my Foundation settled a federal lawsuit with our legal expenses paid by the Pennsylvania Department of State. The Commonwealth carried at least 20,000 dead registrants on the rolls going into the 2020 General Election and we weren’t seeing reasonable efforts made under federal law to fix the problem. The concluding agreement requires the DOS to incorporate data from the Social Security Death Index in its list-matching procedures to identify outdated records, just as my Foundation had done in October 2020 as the basis for the case.”
Adams argued that the commonwealth still has severe issues with its voter rolls including a 20-year-old glitch in the motor voter registration system that registered non-citizens. PILF has sued the commonwealth to disclose records relating to this glitch. The DOS has hidden the records from the public and the General Assembly.
“I regret to remind this Committee that the Commonwealth is still separately locked in federal litigation with my Foundation to disclose records detailing Pennsylvania’s longstanding glitches in the PennDOT motor voter registration system. Members of this Committee will likely recall how this system made national headlines after acknowledging that it exposed untold numbers of foreign national driver’s license customers to the voting system since the 1990s.”
He discussed that the state has fought disclosing records relating to these unlawful registrations.
“For more than three years, election officials in Harrisburg have committed considerable public resources to fight transparency on this issue. But here’s the rub: the only thing more appalling than the resistance is the legal fallout felt among the true victims—the foreign nationals.”
In conclusion, Adams argued that the Commonwealth must commit to full transparency to ensure Pennsylvanians can trust their election process.
“The Commonwealth simply can’t acknowledge a decades-old flaw and then spend more years fighting to keep the granular facts out of the public domain. Election integrity policies alone do not instill public confidence and tamp down misinformation or hysteria. Our election officials’ behavior also plays a serious role. Secrecy in election administration is wholly antithetical to our American Republic.”
Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is a 501(c)(3) is the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity. The Foundation exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections. Drawing on numerous experts in the field, PILF seeks to protect the right to vote and preserve the Constitutional framework of American elections. PILF has brought lawsuits and won victories in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and across the United States.
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