Will Tim DeFoor’s motorized voter control create distrust in Pennsylvania elections?

Pennsylvania’s auditor general is investigating the state’s automatic voter registration system; This comes as some GOP lawmakers in Harrisburg baselessly suggested that the “motor voter” program allows non-U.S. citizens to participate in elections.

Noncitizens who are lawfully in the country are eligible for a driver’s license in Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and Secretary of State officials say there is no evidence they are abusing the nonpartisan motor voter program.

The program has assisted with voter registration at driver’s license centers across the state since the mid-2000s and Democrat Gov. facilitated by Josh Shapiro’s administration by executive order last year.

A year later, Auditor General Tim DeFoor, one of Harrisburg’s top Republicans, announced that his office would investigate the program for possible use by noncitizens.

DeFoor said Tuesday that he oversaw the new program like other programs and maintained that his office’s work was apolitical.

“Audits are tools,” DeFoor said. “The program may be working perfectly fine, but we won’t know unless we audit it.”

But voting rights advocates say the increased scrutiny lends credence to lies that supporters of former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement could use to undermine the credibility of the 2024 election.

“It’s all about creating a situation where they can point out if they don’t like the outcome of the election,” said Marian Schneider, senior policy counsel on voting rights for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is electorally critical to winning the presidency, and if Trump loses, he is almost certain to sow disinformation about widespread voter fraud and rigged elections, as he did in 2020.

statewide Republicans Prepare a series of lawsuits to question whether certain votes should be counted This year, mail-in and provisional ballots were cast with procedural errors, potentially resulting in tens of thousands of ballots being challenged.

Advocates like Schneider say questions about the reliability of the motorized voter program will give Trump’s followers one more option to continue confusion about the outcome.

This does not mean that past scrutiny of the program is not valid.

A 2017 report by the Philadelphia City Commissioners Office found that between 2006 and that year, 220 non-citizens registered to votethe majority register through the motor voter system.

But there is no evidence that these violations could seriously affect the presidential outcome.

PennDot, meanwhile, made upgrades to its system following the release of the Philadelphia report that have been in place for the better part of a decade.

First, the system cross-references the identities of drivers and ID applicants with data from Citizenship and Immigration Services; This is a process that prevents non-US citizens from seeing the voter registration screen.

Additionally, the system asks applicants various questions about their citizenship status, which would prevent non-US citizens from registering.

And ultimately, voter electability falls to local election officials; PennDot only collects the applicant’s personal information and sends it to county administrators, who are then tasked with reviewing and approving the application.

“There is no evidence that any non-U.S. citizen registered to vote during this process,” said PennDot spokeswoman Alexis Campbell.

Shapiro’s 2023 order brought a new wave of GOP scrutiny, particularly of the far-right Freedom Caucus in Harrisburg.

After the update, those who obtain or renew their driver’s license are automatically registered with the option to opt out, rather than being asked if they want to register in the first place.

Members of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus are suing Shapiro’s move, but the effort remains confused in court until after the election. Trump himself condemned the move on his Truth Social platform last fall. he calls it a “scam.”

The Freedom Caucus supported DeFoor’s investigation in a message posted on the group’s Substack on September 20.

“Ignoring the concerns voiced and marginalizing those who question the integrity of the election will only increase distrust among voters,” Freedom Caucus president Dawn Keefer said in her message. “We must take immediate action to ensure that our elections are conducted lawfully.”

Kadida Kenner, CEO of the New Pennsylvania Project, said the voting rights organization has worked “tirelessly” in recent years to combat GOP challenges to election integrity, and that the audit only led to another fire to put out.

He’s also confused about why Kenner’s motor voter program is a target, given that he’s observed more than 45,000 Pennsylvania voters registered since the midterms.

“We realized that the majority of people registered to vote at the DMV were actually Republicans,” Kenner said.

It’s unknown when DeFoor’s office might release the report.

Audits typically take eight to 12 months to complete, according to DeFoor, who said the report won’t be ready until or immediately after Nov. 5.

Kenner said he expects the audit to show that PennDot’s system for preventing noncitizens from voting is working.

“We have free and fair elections here in the state,” Kenner said. “This is an attempt to sow distrust in our election systems, and unfortunately it catches fire because it is a repeated lie.”