This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s collaboration with Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting. Sign up for Votebeat's free newsletters here.
A conservative activist is claiming that Pennsylvania has “tens of thousands” of voters improperly registered, but state officials say he’s misrepresenting a normal, legal part of the voter registration system.
The commonwealth regularly cleans its voter rolls to eliminate names of people who have moved out of the state or otherwise become ineligible. This process isn't immediate. It can take several years, as counties are required to send voters notices to make sure they’re not improperly disenfranchised.
All of this is regulated by federal and state law.
But that hasn't stopped Scott Presler from using these routine lags to suggest that something is wrong with voter registrations, Democratic ones in particular.
Presler, who has been among Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters in Pennsylvania, says he has used an unnamed artificial intelligence tool to identify voters registered in multiple states simultaneously. Presler suggested those registrations were fraudulent and said he would refer them to law enforcement, though he said he hasn’t done so yet.
But multiple registrations themselves aren’t a sign of fraud or illegal voting. In fact, they can be a sign of the law working as intended to protect voters’ rights.
How federal and state law affects timing of removals
In states around the country, people can remain on the voter rolls for years after moving to another state. A federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, governs how voters can be removed from the rolls.
In cases where election officials learn someone may have moved out of their jurisdiction, such as from change-of-address data provided by the U.S. Postal Service, the law requires that election officials provide notice to the voter of their intent to remove them. If the voter doesn’t confirm the move, they may have to confirm their address before they can vote again in their original jurisdiction. But they can’t be removed until they’ve missed voting in two consecutive general elections after being notified. That could be as long as four years.
Under Pennsylvania law, those notices are also sent to any voters who have not participated in an election for five years or updated their registration. That means it can take as long as eight or nine years to remove a voter who has moved, if the NVRA removal process begins after that. According to a 2024 report from the Department of State, in 2023 counties sent out 4,320 notices of duplicate voter registrations and more than 44,000 notices to voters believed to have moved out of state.
Actually voting in two separate jurisdictions in the same election is illegal. Election officials refer such double-voting cases for prosecution, and studies have found it to be very rare.
As for duplicate registrations, states have long shared data to try and identify and resolve them promptly.
Much of this work is done through the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a bipartisan multi-state data-sharing compact aimed at addressing this exact issue.
ERIC compares data from member states, along with other sources such as the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, to identify cross-state movers, so that states can start removing those names. ERIC says it has identified more than 13 million cross-state moves since its inception in 2013.
But several Republican-led states abandoned ERIC in recent years after it became the target of misinformation, undercutting efforts at cross-state collaboration.
Pennsylvania changes are part of routine voter roll maintenance
Presler’s misleading claims go beyond the notion that the duplicate registrations indicate fraud. In his public comments and in an interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA, he has suggested that his claims led the Pennsylvania Department of State to shift more than 10,000 Democratic voters from active to inactive — although it is counties, not the state, that manage voter registrations.
In the week between Feb. 3 and Feb. 10 Pennsylvania’s weekly voter roll statistics showed that about 14,500 registered Democrats moved from active to inactive status. But the Department of State said those shifts had nothing to do with Presler.
“All voter cancellations this week — like any other week — are the result of counties performing routine voter roll maintenance in accordance with the law, as they do consistently year-round,” State Department spokesperson Amy Gulli said in an email. "To our knowledge, zero cancellations have resulted from Presler’s 'research.'”
About 2,000 Republicans and 3,300 unaffiliated or third party voters also shifted from active to inactive that same week.
A review of weekly data since the beginning of 2024 also shows that while 14,500 voters in a party shifting status is relatively high for one week, similar shifts happened in at least seven other instances during that year.
Most of the registration changes happened in Philadelphia, which Presler has specifically called out on social media. Philadelphia’s history of election fraud has helped feed conspiracy theories and unfounded allegations targeting the city.
But Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, said the number of status changes in the city is both normal and unrelated to Presler. Philadelphia is by far the state’s largest city, and predominantly Democratic.
Bluestein said that last Tuesday, before Presler began posting about duplicate voters in the city, city workers had processed a large backlog of national change-of-address and returned-mail data, which accounts for the increase in status changes. All three city commissioners’ offices confirmed Presler had not contacted them.
Federal law restricts systematic cleaning of voter rolls in the 90-day period leading up federal elections, so it is normal for more of that work to take place in the months after the election. In January 2024, for instance, Philadelphia moved roughly 17,000 Democrats from active to inactive status in one week.
Presler’s efforts aren’t strictly aimed at voter roll integrity. He has linked his campaign for removing duplicate registrations to his goal of flipping the state from a plurality of registered Democrats to a plurality of Republicans.
The commonwealth currently has 185,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
