PENNSYLVANIA – Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a non-profit organization that supports litigation to protect election security and integrity, today highlighted a news story previewing an important voter identification lawsuit in Pennsylvania to be argued on October 7. The Delaware Valley Journal examined the issues in the case and spoke to RITE President Justin Riemer for the piece. An excerpt is below:
For years, when registering to vote, Pennsylvanians could list driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers that did not match government databases on their applications.
The Department of State and Secretary Al Schmidt instructed county boards of elections to stand down and refrain from verifying voters’ identities in the event of a mismatch, according to a lawsuit that seeks to remedy this.
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RITE President Justin Riemer told DVJournal that while there’s been other litigation on the topic, “they did not use the same legal claims.”
“The issue that we’ve identified, which is a directive from the state in 2018, [is] that the counties cannot reject voter registration applications where the driver’s license or the last four digits of the Social Security number do not match what’s found in the official government databases,” said Riemer. “The counties used to verify registrations. That the counties cannot reject those mismatched applications, it’s something that other groups have tried to pursue, but they’ve used a different theory than our case.”
“Our case is based entirely on state law,” he said.
To read more, please visit the Delaware Valley Journal.
RITE is at the forefront of pursuing litigation and investigations to shore up weaknesses in states’ voter registration and mail voting systems. Our litigation in states like Pennsylvania aims to fix porous processes that fail to verify the eligibility and identity of individuals before they are registered and can vote. RITE also actively litigates to ensure states are verifying the identity of those casting mail ballots.