LWVPA Is In Court This Week To Protect Voter Privacy

The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Make the Road PA and Common Cause PA are part of an important lawsuit to oppose the release of private voter data to a state Senate committee. In a party line vote, where only Republicans voted in favor, the committee voted to subpoena personally identifying information of every registered voter in Pennsylvania. The committee wants voters’ names, dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.

On Wednesday December 15, the Commonwealth Court will hear arguments in our case. Our organizations, plus eight Pennsylvania voters, joined the case because the protection of our personal data is guaranteed by both state election law and the Pennsylvania Constitution. 

Our organizations advocate for access, transparency and for voters -- for regular people -- to participate in the democratic process, and for the sanctity of our elections. 

The right to vote and to privacy are guaranteed by the Constitution. Pennsylvanians shouldn’t have to give up one for the other. To be sure, some information about voters is already publicly available: who is registered to vote is a matter of public record. This helps make the process more secure - we know who the “qualified electors” are. However, personal information that we provide to confirm that we are eligible to vote is private. That includes our driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

Our government should be protecting our private information, not seeking its disclosure. 

One key aspect of voter privacy is the right not to have the politicians we elect trying to gather up private information about us. Another is the promise that our private information will not be used for other, undefined, purposes. Yet another is the security of information -- the more places information is distributed, the greater the potential for misuse or error. Anyone who has been a victim of identity theft knows how terrible it is when information gets into the wrong hands.  

Pennsylvania law already provides many layers of election security. Voters have to prove identity when we register AND the first time we vote at a new polling location. Voters are verified as a registered voter on the poll books when we get a mail ballot or show up on Election Day. 

To verify the accuracy of results, every county completes a legally required statistical recount of a sample of ballots. In addition, after last year’s general election, 63 counties participated in a pilot program for a “risk-limiting audit” with the Pennsylvania Department of State, the gold standard for checking machine counts, which demonstrated that Pennsylvania’s paper ballots were counted accurately in 2020. 

Pennsylvanians rightly want elections that are fair, free, and secure. These processes ensure the security and integrity of our elections. When political players make the processes partisan because they don’t like the results of an election, we are quickly on very shaky ground. When politicians use their offices, committees and taxpayer funds to undermine faith in elections, democracy itself is at stake.

To be clear, we support legitimate efforts to ensure transparency and security in elections. We want a system that prevents shenanigans. We have parents and grandparents who have been kept from voting. Gerrymandering is a tool used to put a thumb on the scale of how much say voters have. We have seen efforts to give the power to decide to the few, not the many, over and over again.  

But there is no evidence of documented problems from the last several elections. The committee chair says he started this review because of “questions”. That’s hardly an excuse for undercutting our right to privacy and exposing personally identifying information.

The Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee has not been the committee responsible for election policy. The vendor selection process was not transparent and the vendor has no apparent experience in election oversight; from information gathered by the press and our counsel, the contractor appears to be one guy operating out of his home in Iowa.  It is unclear how the data will be used or handled, whether the vendor will report complete information to all the members of the committee or just to one party. It is not clear specifically what the Committee is even investigating. 

We haven’t heard a legitimate basis or purpose for this investigation, and that is deeply concerning. 

Worse, it is having a negative impact on voters: we have heard from people concerned about identity theft and who don’t like the idea that elected officials can subpoena information when they don’t like an outcome, without any evidence that there is a problem. It is its own kind of voter suppression.

As organizations that champion government transparency, keeping an eye on the powerful is exactly what we do. Secure elections should not be political.