A federal judge won’t order Pennsylvania to hand over information on all registered voters in the state, rejecting a request from a group that says it is dedicated to protecting election integrity.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt refused to give the Full Voter Export list to Voter Reference Foundation, leading to a 2024 lawsuit from the nonprofit. The list is publicly available but, pursuant to the state’s Internet Sharing Ban, can’t be published online.
Harrisburg federal judge Joseph Sapotiro ruled April 23 that Schmidt’s decision to not provide a copy of the list to VRF did not violate the National Voter Registration Act and that the Internet Sharing Ban does not violate the First Amendment. His ruling is in contradiction with decisions in the First and Tenth courts of appeal.
“(T)he unambiguous text of the NVRA only requires the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make the voting data available so that the public may inspect it; it does not speak to the requirements of its public release or public circulation,” Saporito said.
“Therefore, we respectfully disagree with the opinions of the First Circuit and the Tenth Circuit that the NVRA’s purposes include the dissemination of the voter data, rather than just its availability to the public, as their interpretation expands the requirement of the statute beyond just its plain statutory text.”
VRF publishes voter rolls on its website and would not promise to not do so with Pennsylvania’s, so the state refused to provide it. Information on voters includes their address, their age and their party affiliation.
The purpose of putting this on the internet is to ensure transparent and fair elections, the group says. “We believe the people, in effect, own this data and have a legal right to see it in an understandable transparent form,” VRF’s site says.
Pennsylvania’s Internet Sharing Ban forbids it, however. And the state should be granted deference to how it applies its own rules, Saporito wrote, even though the Tenth Circuit found New Mexico’s data-sharing ban violated the NVRA.
“When analyzing its text, the NVRA’s public disclosure provision does not require broad dissemination of the voting data; it only speaks of ‘public inspection’ and ‘where available, photocopying,’” Saporito wrote.
