Right Wing Group Drops Commonwealth As Defendant In Legal Effort To Purge Voters

By Matt Cohen

The right-wing 1789 Foundation dropped the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a defendant in their legal effort to disenfranchise more than a quarter million voters. But litigation continues. (Adobe Stock)

Litigation continues in the 1789 Foundation’s efforts to have more than 277,000 voters purged from Pennsylvania’s voter rolls, after the group voluntarily dismissed the Commonwealth as a defendant in the case. 

With the Commonwealth removed as a defendant, that leaves Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt (R), along with AFT Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania  Alliance for Retired Americans — who joined the lawsuit in November — as the remaining parties defending the state’s voter rolls.

In November, on the eve of the general election, a federal judge rejected the right-wing group’s request to remove more than a quarter of a million voters who they argued were ineligible to vote from the state’s rolls. 

In his ruling, judge Robert D. Mariani — an Obama appointee — wrote that Citizen_AG’s assertion that the 277,000 voters in their lawsuit are ineligible “is without proper foundation and is purely speculative.” 

The group first filed their lawsuit Oct. 29 and alleged that Pennsylvania and Schmidt failed to maintain voter rolls in line with the National Voter Registration Act. Specifically, the group alleged that there were more than 277,000 voters who failed to respond to notices issued in 2020 asking them to confirm their change of residency. When the group asked Schmidt’s office for records of people who voted in 2020 and 2022, they were allegedly told it would take more than 30 days to provide that information — so they asked the court to provide the information and purge ineligible voters before the election. 

Shortly after the court denied Citizen_AG’s motion for emergency relief, Schmidt’s office responded to the group’s records request, supplying them with the data of Pennsylvania voters whose registration was canceled because they didn’t respond to a change-of-address notice, or didn’t vote in the 2020 or 2022 elections. In all, at least 132,575 inactive voters were removed from the state’s rolls after the 2022 elections, according to the records from Schmidt’s office.

But Citizen_AG still wasn’t satisfied and filed a supplementary complaint alleging that Schmidt’s office is still violating the NVRA because, according to them, “the numbers do not add up.”

In February, the Commonwealth and Schmidt’s office filed a motion to dismiss the supplementary complaint, to which Citizen_AG filed a brief opposing the motion.

Learn more about the case here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a research error, a Democracy Docket article published March 6 incorrectly reported that the case had been dropped by plaintiffs. That article has been removed. We regret the error.