Voter list accuracy without bias

Editor's note: The following editorial was published by The (Scranton) Times-Tribune on Feb. 3.

Years after Republican state lawmakers lost their ham-handed attempt to restrict access to voting under the guise of fraud prevention, the state government has joined a program that will ensure accuracy without bias.

Republican state Rep. Mike Turzai, now the speaker of the House, infamously acknowledged in 2012 that the true purpose of a voter identification law was to help carry Pennsylvania for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The idea was to impose draconian identification requirements at the polls to diminish the Democratic vote. State courts delayed implementation of the law and ultimately killed it as being unconstitutional.

The law failed largely because its advocates, when challenged in court, could not produce a single case of the in-person voter fraud that the law supposedly would prevent.

Now, the state quietly has joined a multistate enterprise, the Electronic Registration Information Center, that uses technology to ensure the accuracy of voter registration lists.

ERIC also reduces governments' costs to conduct elections. Because its lists are accurate and up-to-date, state and county governments spend less on postage and staff time. And, on Election Day, accurate registration lists produce fewer challenges and provisional ballots.

Every 60 days, state governments participating in ERIC submit their voter registration data and related information from motor vehicle records. The information is rendered anonymous and ERIC compares each registration against all state databases, ensuring that no one is registered to vote in more than one state. It also compares the state data against postal and Social Security records, thus eliminating multiple registrations even in states that are not part of the ERIC system. The system also compares multiple databases to detect transposed numbers, typos and name variations.

Pennsylvania has its own system to compare in-state registration records.

None of the 14 states that used the system through Nov. 2015 have reported any data errors.

The system ensures not only that Pennsylvania's voter registration lists will be as accurate as possible, but as a bulwark against those who would misuse the issue as a means to restrict the franchise rather than to ensure accuracy.