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Should voter registration applications be rejected if voters’ personal information doesn’t match government databases?
The Pennsylvania Department of State said in 2018 that the answer should be no. But in a case currently pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Potter County Commissioner Robert Rossman is arguing the department is misinterpreting the law.
If Rossman’s challenge is successful, it could result in more voter applications being rejected.
In 2018, the Department of State issued a directive stating that, based on state and federal law, counties can’t reject voter applications solely because the driver’s license number or last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number don’t match state or federal databases, as could happen if the voter makes a mistake when filling out the application.
“Counties must ensure their procedures comply with state and federal law, which means that if there are no independent grounds to reject a voter registration application other than a nonmatch, the application may not be rejected and must be processed like all other applications,” the directive reads. Instead, the state argues the mismatches must be investigated.
At any given time, thousands of applications are in a “pending” status while these investigations occur, according to an affidavit in the case from Deputy Secretary Jonathan Marks. A spokesperson for the department said applicants with mismatched information are not able to vote until the mismatch is reconciled.
But Rossman says the directive is preventing him from keeping his county’s voter roll clean, and he’s asking the court to do away with it.
County commissioners are tasked with overseeing voter registration in their county, and the laws governing those duties say that, if an application isn’t “properly completed,” then it must be rejected. Rossman is arguing that when the applicant’s personal data is mismatched, it means the application wasn’t properly completed — and therefore must be rejected.
Rossman is a Republican with hardline conservative views on election security and other issues. He has said in the past that the 2020 election was a “fraud” and “statistically impossible.”
Rossman first filed his case in the state’s Commonwealth Court shortly after the 2024 election. He is being represented by local attorneys working alongside Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on election issues. A three-judge panel dismissed his complaint in December, but Rossman appealed to the state Supreme Court in January.
The Department of State’s directive “impedes his ability to identify duplicate registrations” by cross-checking the ID numbers on new registration applications with those of voters already on the voter roll, Rossman’s attorneys argued in his original court complaint. “The fact that Commissioner Rossman has been precluded, on pain of criminal penalty, from conducting the required examination of voter applications also undermines faith in the integrity of the election process.”
The Department of State, for its part, argues that while federal law requires voter applications to have a space for driver’s licence and Social Security numbers, it doesn’t require applications to be rejected if those numbers don’t match and neither does state law. The state also argues that state law requires mismatches to be investigated, but not outright rejected unless there is another disqualifying factor. If the investigation can’t resolve the mismatch, then the application can be rejected, the state says.
“In short, the fundamental disagreement in this case is not truly about what the law allows or requires, but rather is rooted in Commissioner Rossman’s insistence on ignoring what the Directive and the [Commonwealth Court] opinion actually say,” the state wrote in its brief.
Rossman said in an interview that the department is trying to recast in court what the plain text of the directive says. He agrees an investigation needs to be done to determine if the mismatches are a mistake and that the applications shouldn’t be rejected outright. But, he said, the directive still requires counties to accept the applications even once the investigations are done.
If the state’s argument is that the applications should be rejected if the investigation fails to resolve the mismatch, he argued, then the state should amend its directive.
“This is the pattern with the Department of State — they put out vague directives,” Rossman said. “They just keep making things up as they go along. If that’s what they actually meant to say, it would literally take them 10 minutes” to amend it.
Rossman’s case is not the first to challenge the directive. Conservative activist Heather Honey challenged it in 2023, but the Commonwealth Court rejected that lawsuit last May. Honey is now a deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Rossman's case raises different legal questions.
Rossman said he had no contact with Honey about her case.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.