Philadelphia, PA – The Committee of Seventy released the following statement in response to news that the Pennsylvania Department of State and Lancaster County election officials identified five improperly registered voters, including a non-citizen who cast a ballot, through routine voter roll maintenance:
“This is exactly how the system is supposed to work. Pennsylvania’s voter list maintenance procedures, strengthened in recent years by reforms to PennDOT’s Motor Voter Program, identified these registrations, canceled them, and referred cases of attempted or actual voting to law enforcement. That is election integrity in action, not evidence of a broken system.
Every voter registration applicant in Pennsylvania must affirm their citizenship under penalty of perjury. Human error, and in rare cases, individual wrongdoing, can still occur. This is a system run by people, processing millions of records. What matters is whether officials catch it, correct it, and hold offenders accountable, which they did.
If authorities determine that any individual knowingly registered or attempted to vote while ineligible to do so, that is a serious crime, and we expect law enforcement to pursue prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. But isolated cases like this, out of hundreds of thousands of registered voters in Lancaster County alone, are not evidence of widespread fraud. They are evidence that Pennsylvania’s safeguards are functioning as intended.
We continue to have confidence in the professionalism of Pennsylvania’s election officials, and we caution against those who would use rare, isolated incidents to sow broader doubt about the integrity of our elections.”
About the Committee of Seventy
The Committee of Seventy is a nonpartisan civic leadership organization that advances representative, ethical, and effective government in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania through citizen engagement and public policy advocacy. Founded in 1904, C70 has spent more than 120 years protecting election integrity and empowering citizens to participate meaningfully in democracy.