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As conservative activists scour voter rolls for noncitizens who are ineligible to vote, one under-the-radar tool has proven popular: lists of people rejected for jury duty.
Typically, noncitizens are not allowed to serve on juries, so courts ask people who are called for jury duty to confirm that they are citizens. The list of people who say that they aren’t is public information in Pennsylvania, and Republicans and conservative activists have sought to compare these lists with voter rolls in an effort to identify noncitizen voters.
“I will not stop until we have acquired the non-juror records for every county in Pennsylvania,” Scott Presler, one such activist, said in a September X post. “We have found non-citizens in every single county — even red ones. Yes, many of them are registered voters.”
But, for many reasons, such comparisons are riddled with inaccuracies. Votebeat and Spotlight PA scrutinized 13 potential noncitizen voters identified using this method in a large Pennsylvania county. We found several individuals who had once been noncitizens but were later naturalized, but zero voters who had registered before gaining citizenship.
Our analysis also revealed that some supposed matches between the two lists may actually be different people, and even discovered one U.S.-born citizen caught up in the effort.
Chester County GOP hunts for noncitizen voters
In August, the Republican Committee of Chester County sent a letter to the Chester County Board of Elections saying that the committee had compared the county’s non-juror list to the county’s voter roll and discovered more than 180 potential noncitizen voters, which it provided in a spreadsheet to the county commissioners.
“The problems addressed in this letter require you to act with transparency and accountability,” the letter said. “We and a substantial number of your constituents await your response.”
While the Chester County GOP’s letter came shortly after Presler said he, too, was granted access to Chester County’s non-juror list, Jon Veurink, executive vice chair of the county GOP, said his recollection was that the committee obtained it on its own.
Votebeat and Spotlight PA acquired that list through a public records request and recreated the county GOP’s process: We compared the non-juror list to the state’s voter roll and looked for matches. To ensure they were the same matches the GOP found, we made sure the voters’ political party and voter registration date matched the committee’s information.
Votebeat and Spotlight PA then used the state’s mail ballot request list and public records databases to find email addresses for roughly two-thirds of the potential noncitizen voters. We emailed them questions about their citizenship, their jury service, and their voter registration, without telling them what date the state’s data said they registered to vote.
Only 13 of the voters got back to us. But of them, not one noncitizen voter was confirmed.
“That’s good detective work,” Veurink said in response to the findings. “I hope that’s the case all the way around, but there’s a process we want the county to follow to make sure no noncitizens are voting.”
(He didn’t specify what that process would be.)
Twelve of the respondents were naturalized citizens whose naturalization date was on or before their voter registration date. One was a U.S.-born citizen.
One respondent initially appeared to have registered before naturalizing, but when Votebeat and Spotlight PA reached out to the county to confirm, the county discovered that a county worker had made a data entry error on the voter’s registration date. Andrew Kreider, a spokesperson for the county, said they suspect a worker mistook the new voter as someone else with the same first name and birthday and updated that person’s registration rather than creating a new registration. The county said the error is in the process of being corrected.
Kreider said Chester County met with the Republican committee in August and explained the limitations of comparing the two lists.
“We are committed to protecting the integrity of elections in Chester County, and will act quickly, in compliance with federal and state law, to address any specific and verifiable accusations of voter fraud,” Kreider said in an email.
Why comparing non-juror lists with voter rolls is flawed
Several of the contacted voters did not recall receiving a jury summons in the years covered by the GOP’s list, and there may be a good reason for that: Jury rejection lists are missing a lot of information that would be needed to accurately match them with voter rolls.
The lists don’t contain birthdates, addresses, or, most importantly, the types of unique ID numbers — such as driver’s license or Social Security numbers — that are needed to positively say a person on one list is the same as a person on another list.
For example, a person named John Smith may be rejected from jury service because they are a noncitizen, but another John Smith may register to vote. Without those other identifying details, it may appear as if they are the same person when they actually aren’t.
Those limitations are why the Pennsylvania Department of State posted on its website earlier this year warning about the dangers of using jury rejections to find eligible voters.
“Nonjuror lists are not a useful tool to verify the accuracy of voter rolls,” Geoff Morrow, a spokesperson for the department, said in a statement. “Analyses of voter lists that have relied on faulty methodologies such as comparisons to nonjuror lists can lead to inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters.”
The Chester County GOP recognized this deficiency in its letter to the county, but it hasn’t stopped conservative activists from overstating the lists' usefulness.
Presler, the conservative activist and leader of Early Vote Action, began requesting non-juror lists in July and matching them with voter rolls, in part to push the U.S. Senate to pass the SAVE America Act. He said his goal was to examine the lists in all 67 counties.
Presler has said the method has found more than 5,000 Pennsylvania voters “flagged as matches” and will enable his team to “identify how many people may have fraudulently voted,” but he has not acknowledged the flaws in this type of match or released his results so that they can be independently verified. Benny Johnson, another conservative activist, said the lists had been used to “purge thousands of illegal aliens from the voter rolls in Pennsylvania,” which has not happened.
Presler did not return a request for comment.
Poor matching is not the only issue, however. The non-juror lists may also be out of date.
Some who responded to Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s survey said that, yes, they had received a jury summons in the past and responded that they were a noncitizen, but that they later gained citizenship and then registered to vote.
Wren Orey, managing director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said comparing voter lists with non-juror lists has been tried before. Some states, most notably Texas, have tried to use it to clean their voter rolls.
“Time and time again they find that the data is unreliable,” Orey said.
People may not always be honest when trying to get out of jury service, they said, while others become citizens after being rejected from the jury. Orey said one county official in California did a pilot program using this method of comparison and found that every single person identified as a noncitizen on the juror list had naturalized after that list was created but before registering.
“So they ultimately didn’t continue the program, because it was just a completely unhelpful source of information,” they said.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.