Ideally, the number of noncitizens casting ballots in the United States should be zero.

But elections and voter registration are run by human beings, so mistakes are inevitable. The test of any system is not the ideal but how it responds when the inevitable mistakes occur.

As we head into another divisive election season, with the potential for misinformation about the nation’s voting processes, it’s necessary to remember that state and local election officials are dedicated to maintaining the integrity and legitimacy of the system.

In a teleconference last week assembled by PA Voters Decide, current and past election officials — including former Mercer County elections director Jeff Greenburg — defended the integrity of voting in Pennsylvania and the United States.

One of the participants, Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, defended the state’s electoral legitimacy by bringing up a failure that allowed noncitizens to register and cast votes in Pennsylvania elections.

In 2017, officials in the Philadelphia City Commission, which oversees the city’s elections, discovered that PennDOT’s system was offering non-U.S. citizens applying for driver’s license renewals the opportunity to file a voter registration. This was because of a glitch.

In Philadelphia, 220 noncitizens registered to vote, out of more than 1 million registered voters, between 2006 and 2017. That figure included about 165 who had filed through Pennsylvania’s “motor voter” program.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the officials entrusted with running elections in Philadelphia and across the state moved quickly to identify the problem and repair it.

Al Schmidt — then a Philadelphia city commissioner, now Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth in charge of elections — learned about the glitch and its impact, and the agencies fixed it.

During the teleconference, Bluestein credited election officials and PennDOT for their response.

“After we met with them, they took it seriously,” Bluestein said “As far as we can tell, that has not been an issue since then.”

Schmidt said at the time that he didn’t think noncitizens in the United States intended to cast ballots illegally. Panelists on the PA Voters Decide teleconference said the same thing and pointed out that people in this country on visa status don’t want to risk their residency by breaking the law.

In terms of dictating elections, the glitch’s impact was minimal. Statewide, noncitizens may have cast 544 votes between 2000 and 2017 out of 93 million total votes during that period, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. That’s less than one-one-thousandth of 1% of the total.

But the potential damage isn’t in the number of votes cast. It’s reputational. It gives fuel to those who would discredit the electoral process.

Addressing mistakes with transparency and urgency helps restore confidence.

To their credit, the election officials who spoke in the teleconference understand that. The same probably can be said for their counterparts across the state.

The response to Pennsylvania’s motor voter registration glitch indicates that election officials are dedicated and focused on integrity in elections as the election approaches.

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