Some 100,000 noncitizens are on the voter registration rolls in Pennsylvania. Now a lawsuit has been filed to determine the extent of illegal voting in the Keystone State.
State officials admitted last September that a “glitch” allowed individuals, regardless of citizenship status, to register to vote since the 1990s. A month after that revelation, Secretary of State Pedro Cortes resigned.
“For months, Pennsylvania bureaucrats have concealed facts about noncitizens registering and voting. That ends today,” said J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which sued the state on Monday.
A study by the Secretary of State’s office and Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation matched noncitizen driver’s license holders with records belonging to roughly 100,000 current voters in the statewide registration database.
Alleging that the Secretary of State’s office has continued to block federal public-inspection rights after Cortes’ resignation, Adams said PILF “hopes to finally get answers about the true scale of noncitizen voting in Pennsylvania and assist lawmakers in crafting reforms that fix it.”
In October 2016, PILF issued a report titled “Aliens and Felons.” It found that of the noncitizens registered to vote in Philadelphia, half had cast ballots in at least one election.
Pennsylvania officials have not commented on the lawsuit.
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