The Pennsylvania Department of State must purge more than 20,000 deceased residents—many of whom ‘voted’ in recent elections—from the state’s voter rolls, according to a recent settlement.
The agreement comes as part of a lawsuit from election-integrity watchdog the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
While PILF has been tracking and documenting Pennsylvania’s fraudulent voters for years, Republicans have been especially critical of how the most recent presidential election was administered.
“PILF’s data revealed that 9,212 of these deceased registrants had been dead for at least five years, 1,990 had been dead for at least 10 years, and 197 had been dead for at least twenty years,”said J. Christian Adams, PILF president and general counsel, said in a press release. “In addition, hundreds of these registrants showed post-death voting credits for the 2016 and/or 2018 elections.”
Kathy Boockvar, an unelected appointee of Gov. Tom Wolf who was tasked with administering elections in Pennsylvania, announced her resignation as secretary of state in February.
She and Wolf, both Democrats, had outraged the GOP-led legislature by unilaterally loosening the state’s voting procedures in defiance of rules specifically passed by the legislature to address the pandemic.
GOP-backed legal challenges of Boockvar’s usurped authority went to the US Supreme Court both before and after the election, but in each instance the court refused to rule on them, citing procedural technicalities as the basis for dismissal.
Lawsuits from other battleground states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, have since determined that leftist state officials’ use of the coronavirus to seize partisan control of election administration was unconstitutional.
But the biggest prize of all the battleground states was Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes effectively sealed the race for Democrat Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump.
Despite Trump boasting a lead of hundreds of thousands of votes there on election night, local officials, following Boockvar’s orders, continued to receive and count votes for several days afterward.
Biden officially clinched the state by a margin of 80,555 votes amid reports of alarming irregularities, such as a tractor–trailer loaded with ballots from New York disappearing mysteriously in Philadelphia.
Now, at least, the voter rolls will be cleaned up.
“This marks an important victory for the integrity of elections in Pennsylvania,” Adams said.
“The Commonwealth’s failure to remove deceased registrants created a vast opportunity for voter fraud and abuse,” he continued. “It is important to not have dead voters active on the rolls for 5, 10, or even 20 years. This settlement fixes that.”
According to PILF, the terms of the settlement are as follows:
- Before the 2021 statewide general election, the death data set received from the Electronic Registration Information Center will be compared to the full voter-registration database to identify individuals who are ineligible to vote due to their death.
- The Pennsylvania Department of State will give each county commission the names of the individuals identified as deceased and inform the commissions that they should promptly cancel the registrations.
- The Department of State will provide PILF with copies of the full voter export at three-month intervals on three separate occasions: May 30, Aug. 31 and Nov. 30, 2021.
Although it may be half a year too late for Trump supporters, the settlement comes at a pivotal time. In Georgia, Texas and several other states, GOP legislatures are now seeking to reassert their constitutionally vested authority with a raft of retrospective reforms.
Democrats have pushed back, saying laws that make it harder for dead people and other ineligible participants to vote are racist.
But many have pointed to the hypocrisy of the Left, which regularly insists on imposing invasive background checks and screenings to curtail civil liberties involving everything from gun-ownership to travel during the pandemic.
“You really think that minorities in America do not have ID’s?” the National Republican Senatorial Committee said in a recent press release questioning Democrats over their disingenuous rhetoric.
“Really? No, you don’t think that at all,” it continued. “You simply play the race card in order to stop this common-sense reform. Your suggestion that minorities do not have ID is, in fact, racist.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
