Will Tim DeFoor's motor voter audit sow mistrust in Pennsylvania elections?

Pennsylvania’s top auditor is investigating the state’s automatic voter registration system, coming as some GOP lawmakers in Harrisburg baselessly suggest that the “motor voter” program allows non-U.S. citizens to participate in elections.

Noncitizens who are in the country legally are eligible to get their driver’s license in Pennsylvania; officials with both the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Department of State say there is no evidence that they are abusing the nonpartisan motor voter program.

The program has aided voter registration at driver’s license centers across the state since the mid-2000s and was streamlined by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration last year via executive order.

A year later, Auditor General Tim DeFoor — one of Harrisburg’s highest-ranking Republicans — announced that his office would investigate the program for possible noncitizen use.

DeFoor said in a statement Tuesday that he was auditing the new program as he would any other and maintained that his office’s work is apolitical.

“Audits are tools,” DeFoor said. “The program could be working completely fine, but we don’t know that unless we audit.”

But voting rights advocates say the heightened scrutiny lends credence to falsehoods that adherents of former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement could use to undermine the credibility of the 2024 election.

“It’s all about setting up a situation they can point to when they don’t like the result of the election,” said Marian Schneider, senior policy counsel for voting rights with the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is considered electorally critical to winning the presidency, and if Trump loses, he will almost certainly sow disinformation about widespread voter fraud and a rigged election, as he did in 2020.

Republicans across the state are preparing a litany of lawsuits to challenge whether some votes will count this year, such as mail-in and provisional ballots cast with procedural errors, potentially contesting tens of thousands of votes.

Advocates like Schneider say that questions over the credibility of the motor voter program will give Trump’s followers one more option to perpetuate confusion about the result.

That‘s not to say past scrutiny of the program wasn’t valid.

A 2017 report by Philadelphia’s Office of the City Commissioners found that between 2006 and that year, 220 noncitizens had registered to vote, with a majority registering through the motor voter system.

But there is no evidence that those violations could have seriously swayed a presidential result.

Meanwhile, PennDot made upgrades to its system after the Philadelphia report’s release that have been in place for the better part of a decade.

For one, its system cross-references the identity of driver’s license and ID applicants with data from Citizenship and Immigration Services — a process that filters out non-U.S. citizens from ever seeing the voter registration screen.

Further on, the system asks applicants several questions about citizenship status that would bar non-U.S. citizens from registration.

And, ultimately, a voter‘s eligibility falls on local election officials; PennDot only collects the applicant’s personal information and sends it to county administrators, who are then tasked with vetting and approving the application.

“There is no evidence that any non-U.S. citizen has been registered to vote through this process,” PennDot spokesperson Alexis Campbell said.

Shapiro’s 2023 order brought a renewed wave of GOP scrutiny, particularly from the far-right Freedom Caucus in Harrisburg.

After the update, those receiving or renewing their drivers license are automatically registered — with the choice to opt-out — as opposed to being asked whether they would like to register in the first place.

Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus members are litigating Shapiro’s move, though that effort remains tangled in court until after the election. Trump himself condemned the move on his Truth Social platform last fall, calling it a “scam.”

The Freedom Caucus threw its support behind DeFoor’s inquiry in a Sept. 20 message on the group’s Substack.

“Dismissing voiced concerns and marginalizing those who question election integrity will only exacerbate distrust among the electorate,” Freedom Caucus chairperson Dawn Keefer said in the message. “We must take immediate action to ensure that our elections are conducted according to the law.”

Kadida Kenner, CEO of the New Pennsylvania Project, said that her voting rights organization has worked “tirelessly” to combat GOP challenges to election integrity in recent years, and that the audit only presents another fire to put out.

Kenner is also confused as to why the motor voter program is a target, given what she’s observed registering more than 45,000 Pennsylvanian voters since the midterms.

“What we’ve noticed is that the majority of those being registered to vote at the DMV are actually Republicans,” Kenner said.

It‘s unknown when DeFoor’s office could release the report.

Audits typically take between eight to 12 months to complete, according to DeFoor, who said the report would not be ready before Nov. 5 or immediately afterward.

Kenner said she expects the audit will show that PennDot’s system for stymieing noncitizen voting works.

“We are having free and fair elections here in the commonwealth,” Kenner said. “This is an attempt to sow distrust in our election systems, and unfortunately because it is a repeated lie, it does catch fire.”