Washington, D.C. – July 22, 2025 – J. Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), will testify tomorrow before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration during its hearing titled “Clean Rolls, Secure Elections: Reviewing Voter List Maintenance Standards.”
The Committee on House Administration, chaired by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), oversees the administration of federal elections and the enforcement of election law. The hearing will focus on the critical issue of maintaining accurate and secure voter rolls to ensure election integrity.
Adams’ testimony is set to highlight systemic failures in voter roll maintenance and the need for stronger standards, citing recent PILF investigations into state voter registration records.
“Poor list hygiene is a reliable warning signal for future list maintenance problems,” Adams will tell the committee. “The Public Interest Legal Foundation discovered nearly a quarter of the New York statewide voter roll was missing Social Security numbers. Left unchecked, this means millions of records cannot be matched to the Social Security Death Index for reliable verification.”
Adams will also outline troubling findings from other states, including Maine, where PILF recently identified:
- 18,000 apparently deceased registrants
- 1,500 examples of intrastate duplicates
- 900 examples of interstate duplicates
Adams’ testimony includes evidence of cases like Judy Presto, a Pennsylvania voter who was registered and voted in 2020 despite having died in 2013.
“If Pennsylvania had been using commercial data to screen voter rolls, this illegal vote would not have happened,” Adams will say.
Adams will stress that voter roll problems are less about conspiracy and more about entrenched bureaucratic neglect:
“Failed list maintenance isn’t usually a political conspiracy to keep rolls dirty. It is most often bureaucratic neglect and the inertia of government – a series of small decisions over years. As in Broward, it was rank incompetence.”
The testimony will also cover best practices, including the use of commercial data tools that PILF has successfully used to identify duplicate and deceased registrants.
For more information about J. Christian Adams and Public Interest Legal Foundation’s work, visit https://publicinterestlegal.org.
To read the full testimony, click here.
Media Contact:
Douglas Blair 503-956-9899 dblair@publicinterestlegal.org