DV Journal

An election integrity nonprofit has teamed up with some Delaware Valley residents in a federal lawsuit targeting Pennsylvania’s Department of State over what they claim is a failure to meet the minimum standards for a fair election in 2o22.

Diane Houser of Downingtown, Ruth Moton of Upper Chichester, and Dean Dreibelbis of Glen Mills joined the group United Sovereign Americans, which claims state and federal officials dropped the ball in the election that year.

The plaintiffs claim the state failed to properly conduct the 2022 election and that officials certified the results “despite analysis showing the election results were per se unreliable on account of apparent error rates exceeding those the law permits before any federal election becomes unreliable.” And their attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., says legal action is the only remedy.

“Only a court has the power to require respondents to act to bring the 2024 (and subsequent) federal elections in Pennsylvania into conformity with the minimum standards set by Congress,” Castor said. His lawsuit argues that “systemic issues which occurred in the 2022 combined federal and state election in Pennsylvania will continue uncorrected in 2024, 2026, 2028, etc. absent intervention by this court.”

The lawsuit claims election officials’ actions in 2022 did not meet minimum federal standards in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It asks the court to intervene to ensure that only properly registered voters cast ballots in federal and state elections for 2024.

It also asks the court to make sure that only properly cast votes are counted and that all voting systems are compliant “with all critical infrastructure requirements and risk assessments are completed within the actual use context, thereby assuring every ballot is correctly and uniformly processed, as well as accurately tabulated and secured in combined federal and Pennsylvania elections beginning in 2024.”

Many Americans remain concerned about whether elections are being conducted fairly.

A January survey by the University of South Florida found only 24 percent of Republicans believe their vote will be properly counted this year, compared to 58 percent of Democrats. Some 37 percent of Republicans are somewhat confident, 24 percent are not very confident, and 16 percent at not at all confident.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, who was in Newtown, Pa. for a ballot integrity event on Tuesday, said it’s a good idea to make sure the voter rolls are accurate.

“We want the [voter] rolls to be as clean as they possibly can be,” said Whatley. “Look, we don’t want people who should not be voting casting votes, like people who have passed away or people who have moved. You obviously want to make sure you get them off the rolls. We want to make sure the rolls are as accurate as possible. And we have filed lawsuits across the country to get other states to do that and we certainly support that in Pennsylvania.”

Contributing to the problem is the state of the voter rolls, that contained “hundreds of thousands of potential errors at the time of the 2022 general election,” the suit said. They included many duplicate registrations, voters with invalid or illogical voter history, voters placed in inactive statuses on questionable authority, backdated registrations, registrations with a modified date prior to registration, invalid or illogical registration dates, age discrepant registrants, and registrants with questionable addresses.”

“The ability to ‘cast and count votes’ begins with establishing eligibility and registering only qualified citizens into voter registration databases, thus assuring that all ballots granted, cast, and counted, are lawful,” the suit said.

United Sovereign Americans studied data from the 2022 Pennsylvania general election and found “hundreds of thousands of voter registration apparent errors,” the suit contends. Of the votes cast in 2022, they found a total of 1,198,598 evident voting violations, and 1,089,750 unique votes impacted by apparent voting violations.”

The plaintiffs ask the court to compel the state to correct the apparent errors evident from the 2022 elections data and prevent those same or similar ministerial errors from recurring during the Pennsylvania 2024 general election.

Department of State Press Secretary Matt Heckel  called the suit “frivolous.”

And “without any supporting facts or viable legal theories, a panoply of conspiracy claims advanced by litigants who have repeatedly filed baseless actions rejected by the courts. Undeterred, these litigants and their counsel continue to waste taxpayer money. The department will respond accordingly,” said Heckel.

The U.S. Attorney General’s Office, also a defendant, declined to comment.  The state Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

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With the Nov. 7 general election only months away, a group of Chester County residents recently gave the Board of Elections information about problems with the voter rolls.

The issues they found included 144 registered voters who moved to different states or counties yet were still listed as voters. The voters were found to have moved to California, Texas, Arizona, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, and South Carolina.

Working in pairs, the residents visited homes using information from the National Change of Address (NCOA) database.

Of the names and addresses visited, they found 70 percent had moved away. They talked to current residents and neighbors to determine if the registered voter they sought lived at the address listed.

The volunteers later used information from the real estate Multiple Listing Service and other online data to confirm their findings.

They also estimated that another 2,180 people who could vote in Chester County no longer live there. And 30 active voters who moved from Pocopson precinct 530 were also included.

“In our review of the voter registration system, we have found the process woefully in need of reform,” the residents wrote in a letter to the Board of Elections. “Chester County has displayed a pattern of only performing statutory duties when threatened with a lawsuit.”

One person involved in the effort, Diane Houser, said the residents decided to investigate after learning that people on the voter rolls but no longer living in the county could have voted in 2022 in Chester County by mail. If no one answered the door when they canvassed, she said, they talked to neighbors who often knew whether a family had moved.

“We are just a group of concerned citizens,” said Houser. They started with about seven people. More joined them. “We’ve been sharing our concerns with the county.”

Because two Common Pleas judges now sit on the Board of Elections, Houser said she hopes they will be receptive to improving the voter rolls. This year the BOE includes Judge Bret Binder, Judge Analisa Sondergaard, and Commissioner Michelle Kichline.

In 2019, the watchdog group Judicial Watch sent Chester County officials a letter noting its voting rolls needed to be updated and violated various statutes.

“The county reported removing only five voter registrations in the last two-year reporting period on the grounds that the registrants failed to respond to an address confirmation notice and failed to vote in two consecutive federal elections,” Judicial Watch wrote. “This is an absurdly low number for a county of this size.” The county also has a 97 percent voter registration rate.

Similarly, in 2021, Judicial Watch notified the county of voting violations, including more registered voters (100.86 percent) than citizens old enough to vote. And a 2021 study of state representative districts by Douglas Frank, Ph.D., showed that nearly 100 percent of the elderly are registered to vote and are voting.

“We want to wake people up and let them know what we’ve uncovered,” Houser said.

“Board of Elections is reviewing the information provided in the letter,” said county spokeswoman Rebecca Brain.

Separately, a group called Chesco United found 66 Chester County voters registered before they were born; 166 people voted before they were registered; 3,300 voters lived in apartment buildings but had no apartment number; 13 voters lived in commercial office buildings; 40 voters lived at U.S. Post Office addresses; and 46 voters lived at a hotel for more than a year.

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