A civil-rights group raised questions Tuesday about Pennsylvania’s participation in a program designed to help purge voters with duplicate registrations in different states. Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said state officials have rebuffed his requests for details about how rigorously state officials will oversee the purging of voter rolls under the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. “Cleaning voter-registration rolls of inaccurate and duplicate information is important, but it must be achieved in a way that does not improperly or wrongly purge voters from the rolls,” Walczak said in a letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele.
The program compares voter data from 28 participating states to identify apparent duplicate registrations, similar to the county-to-county comparisons that have been done for years, said State Department spokesman Ron Ruman.
Ruman said the department will advise county election officials to obey the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement to send written cancellation notices to voters with more than one registration and its ban on purging those voters until after two two-year election cycles. The same law also bars purges within 90 days of any election.
The department received its first set of data from the other states — about 370,000 records — a few weeks ago and is only starting to make decisions about how to proceed, Ruman said.
Full Article: ACLU seeks info on Pennsylvania voter roll purge.