Lehigh Valley officials defend election integrity as feds sue Pa. for voter data

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Lehigh Valley election officials vouched for their efforts to patrol their own voter rolls Friday — a day after the U.S. Department of Justice sued Pennsylvania and five other states for data on registered voters.

The lawsuit is part of the wider effort by the Trump administration in what it describes as a broad effort to ensure states conduct free and fair elections.

While Congress can pass laws setting guidelines and standards for states to follow, it's up to states — and in Pennsylvania's case, counties — to execute those practices.

In the lawsuit against Pennsylvania, federal officials allege Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt declined to fully turn over statewide voter registration data and details of how the commonwealth enforces the Help America Vote Act. The 2002 law requires that states make efforts to ensure that ineligible voters don't cast ballots.

In a series of letters this year, Schmidt provided federal officials with details of how Pennsylvania checks its voter rolls for accuracy and shared a list of all registered voters in the state. However, he would not provide some identifying data the U.S. Attorney General's Office sought, including driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of those voters.

Attorney General Pam Bondi contends that multiple federal laws empower her to review this data to ensure that states are complying with standards spelled out by Congress.

In addition to Pennsylvania, she approved lawsuits against California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and New Hampshire on Thursday after they also declined to fully share voter data. She signed off on similar lawsuits against Maine and Oregon last week.

“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Bondi said in a statement. “Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure — states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.”

The Associated Press reported the Justice Department has sent similar inquiries to at least 26 states in the past few months. Many of those states shared incomplete data, citing state privacy laws or the federal government's failure to fully comply with the federal Privacy Act, which seeks to protect individuals' personal information.

Schmidt cited those privacy concerns in a prepared statement. The request by the U.S. Justice Department, which does not oversee elections, is unprecedented and illegal, he said.

"We will vigorously fight the federal government’s overreach in court," he said. "The Department of State will aggressively defend the privacy of Pennsylvania voters against this baseless lawsuit, and as Secretary of the Commonwealth, I have an obligation to protect the personal information that Pennsylvania voters entrust us with, and I take that obligation extremely seriously."

'Neither undocumented nor dead folks are voting'

In Pennsylvania, the State Department controls the voter database, establishes what equipment can be used to conduct elections and sets guidelines on how elections are conducted. It's the counties, however, that execute on those instructions and directly oversee the democratic process.

Lehigh County Executive Phil Armstrong, who also serves on the county's Board of Elections, said the county goes to great lengths to ensure that only eligible voters cast a ballot.

Last year, county officials identified and weeded out approximately 1,800 flawed or bogus voter registration applications. In the rare instances where fraud does occur, it's at such a minor level that it cannot effect the outcome of any election, he said.

"We do scrutinize those elections and those things and try to follow all of the rules. I really think [Chief Clerk of Elections] Tim Benyo and our election team does an amazing job," Armstrong said.

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure agreed.

While President Donald Trump and his political allies made numerous claims that his opponents stole the 2020 election by counting votes from dead and illegal voters, all of them proved baseless, McClure said. Investigations by Trump's own Justice Department found no evidence showing massive fraud. McClure accused Trump of spreading misinformation and sowing mistrust in American democracy.

"Neither undocumented nor dead folks are voting in Northampton County. It's really just myth," he said.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, has tracked cases of election fraud in the United States dating back to 1982. Its database recognizes 1,600 instances of voter fraud in that time period.

That total would amount to a rounding error if they all occurred last year, when 174 million Americans voted, let alone the billions of votes cast in the 42 years before that election cycle.