J. Christian Adams: Voter rolls without dead people is good first step toward election integrity in Pa.

All eyes were on Pennsylvania in the 2020 election. The commonwealth’s election process was one of chaos, with issues caused by mass mail balloting, blocking poll watcher access and ballot harvesting, to name just a few.

Now some good news.

Prior to the 2020 election, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) provided the commonwealth with at least 21,000 deceased registrants by name who remained on the voter rolls less than a month before the general election.

Of these 21,000, 9,212 had been dead for at least five years, 1,990 had been dead for at least 10 years and, astonishingly, 197 had been dead for at least 20 years.

To protect the integrity of Pennsylvania’s elections, PILF sued the secretary of state to have the dead registrants removed from the voter rolls.

This month, the case settled in a big win for election integrity. The commonwealth agreed to remove all the dead voters. Even better, we won a settlement that requires state election officials to compare the entire voter rolls to the Cumulative Social Security Death Index in order to identify dead voters. The state will direct counties to remove the names of dead voters.

This is a huge win for election integrity. Pennsylvanians deserve a free and fair election process. When one fraudulent vote is cast, it dilutes everyone’s vote.

The opportunity for fraud and abuse in Pennsylvania was abundantly high with so many deceased registrants on the rolls. This settlement solves this problem. There will be no more ballots cast from beyond the grave in the Keystone State.

This key settlement marks the first successful litigation in Pennsylvania following the 2020 election chaos. It is the first win of many needed to strengthen Pennsylvania’s election system.

Another huge problem with Pennsylvania’s voter rolls is nonresidential addresses claimed by voters, violating the law. I personally visited some of these addresses last year. They included vacant lots, abandoned buildings, weightlifting clubs and even a business headquarters. In Pennsylvania, commercial businesses may not serve as a registration address. Mail ballots exacerbate the problem with bad voter rolls.

Work remains to be done. The commonwealth must find a solution to all of these registrations at businesses and vacant lots.

To continue to strengthen Pennsylvania’s election process, the state Legislature also needs to enact reforms.

For mail balloting, the commonwealth should build a system to verify people’s identities and enact measures to prevent ballot harvesting, especially in nursing homes.

The state also should ban outside private funding for elections. Big-tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg should not be influencing county election offices. Millions of dollars flowed into Philadelphia-area election offices to build in structural bias. Voting procedures in Philadelphia were not the same as voting procedures in Westmoreland or Somerset counties.

The agreed settlement by the secretary of state to remove dead voters from the rolls in Pennsylvania is a huge win and step in the right direction for election integrity.

The good news is it just got a lot harder to cast a ballot from beyond the grave in Pennsylvania. But there is still more to be done.

J. Christian Adams is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights. He grew up in Hempfield.