Republicans scrutinizing Pa.'s automatic motor voter system ahead of 2024 race

Republicans are stepping up scrutiny of Pennsylvania's system for registering people to vote through its driver's licensing centers, six weeks before what is expected to be a close presidential contest in the battleground state.

Auditor General Tim DeFoor, a Republican running for re-election in the Nov. 5 election, last week launched an audit of Pennsylvania's so-called motor voter system.

The audit comes one year after Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro's administration began automatic voter registration at driver's licensing centers. The audit is to include checking to see whether noncitizens are properly screened out from registering to vote — dovetailing with a top election-year issue for many Republicans nationally who are questioning whether noncitizens are registering to vote.

Shapiro's introduction of automatic voter registration last year drew condemnation from Republicans and former President Donald Trump and threats of litigation. At the time, some two dozen states already had authorized a version of automatic voter registration and no court challenge in Pennsylvania has emerged.

The Shapiro administration says non-citizens are not allowed to register to vote and that there is no evidence that noncitizens have registered to vote in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, dozens of state Republican lawmakers are demanding the Shapiro administration do more to ensure that noncitizens are not registered to vote and curtail automatic voter registration functions strictly to transactions involving driver licensing.

In a statement Monday, PennDOT Secretary Michael Carroll said the agency will cooperate with the audit.

But Carroll accused DeFoor of “politicizing his office, and undermining confidence in our election system by furthering the disproven myth that non-citizens are registering or voting in Pennsylvania.”

DeFoor's office called it “disheartening that so many baseless assumptions" have been made about the audit.

“Our audits do not play ‘gotcha’ or play into a political agenda,” DeFoor's office said in a statement.

DeFoor notified Shapiro’s administration on Sept. 16 that his office was launching an audit of the “Motor Voter process” to ensure it complies with state and federal law. The audit will study data between Jan. 1 through June 30.

A spokesperson for DeFoor said the audit arose because the program is a year old and has enough data to perform an audit. DeFoor’s spokesperson said audits typically take months or years to complete — not weeks — and is unlikely to be completed before the November election.

Last year’s introduction of automatic voter registration means that, under the new format, prompts on computer screens in driver’s license centers take the user to a template to register to vote. That leaves it up to them to choose not to register. Previously, prompts on the computer screen first asked the user whether they wanted to register to vote.

The Shapiro administration says the system is programmed to screen out noncitizens.

But Republican lawmakers say other transactions with PennDOT are performing automatic voter registration functions, without legal authority.

They cited a Sept. 13 state Supreme Court ruling involving a contested ballot in a Luzerne County primary election. The voter who cast the contested ballot had testified before a lower court that he believed changing his vehicle registration address — not his driver’s license — had triggered a change in his voter registration address.

In a letter on Friday, 63 House Republicans asked Shapiro to restrict automatic voter registration to interactions only involving someone getting or updating a driver’s license or a state photo identification card.

Forms available from PennDOT for a driver to change their vehicle registration address include the notification that “this application will also serve as a request to update your voter registration unless you check this box.”

In a statement, Shapiro's office said automatic voter registration is separate from the process to change a vehicle registration address. It also said the facts of the court case were “severely underdeveloped.”