Allegheny County Council will soon consider a bill that would require additional steps to ensure only U.S. citizens are registered to vote.
The proposed ordinance directs county elections officials to share voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security prior to the November election, so the department can verify the citizenship of local voters. In the future, the Elections Division would be mandated to confirm every newly registered voter’s citizenship status with DHS.
“County election officials, all they do is check for identity,” said Sam DeMarco, a Republican council member who introduced the measure Tuesday. “They do not check for citizenship.”
In an email, David Voye, the manager of the county’s Division of Elections, said that when they complete their registration form, voters are “required to affix their signature and declare under the penalties of perjury that they are a citizen and at least 18 years old.
“If a voter applies [online] and [answers] ‘NO’ to either of the questions, their application wouldn’t be processed. Failure to sign the online or paper declaration would also disqualify the application,” he added.
The county itself does not corroborate that information, but Pennsylvania’s Department of State also verifies partial Social Security numbers, and first-time voters must provide ID at their polling place, among other protections.
The penalties for lying on a registration form can include incarceration and fines, and put at risk a person’s ability to remain in the U.S. — or their prospects for future citizenship.
DeMarco acknowledged that cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare. The purpose of the bill, he said, is to prevent instances where noncitizens “potentially end up committing a crime inadvertently, because some third-party voter registration group pushed them to sign up, telling them that it was okay.”
Philip Hensley-Robin, director of the watchdog group Common Cause of Pennsylvania, said DeMarco’s proposal risks striking legal citizens from the voter rolls.
“It's a solution in search of a problem,” Hensley-Robin said.
He said the Elections Division constantly maintains the voter rolls. And he said that DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE database, is not a record of U.S. citizens and might not include recent naturalizations, so it shouldn’t be used to determine eligibility to vote.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Noncitizen voting has become a focal point of Republican messaging in recent years. DeMarco’s proposal is in line with other legislative efforts around the issue, but he framed it as a way to head off potential conspiracy theories and false claims of fraud.
“This isn't any claim that all of a sudden, oh, my gosh, noncitizens en masse are registering or are going to be voting in our elections,” DeMarco said. “I just wanted to put the extra step in place to assure the voters of Allegheny County that everything is proper.”
Still, Hensley-Robin worried the proposal “plays into fear-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing about the level of noncitizen voting, which is minuscule.”
The bill was referred to council’s committee on government reform.
