Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.
Pennsylvania officials say they’re not in discussions to hand over private voter information to Ohio, where officials are trying to identify voters who are double-registered following the state’s departure from a bipartisan voter data sharing program.
In December, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, announced a “multi-state election integrity network” called EleXa that will share its voter rolls with 10 other states to “identify people who try to vote illegally, often by having more than one active voter registration and then casting multiple ballots in the same election.”
The press release also said that Pennsylvania was “finalizing an agreement” to join the program.
But officials in Pennsylvania say that is not the case. Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said the two state agencies spoke last summer about a possible information-sharing agreement, but the conversation ultimately fizzled out.
“In September, our Department provided Ohio with revisions to a proposed agreement that would accomplish that objective while protecting voters’ private information,” she said in a statement. “We never received a response, and we never engaged in any discussions about joining any larger election-data-sharing initiative with Ohio.”
Pennsylvania is still a member of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a longstanding multi-state voter roll maintenance program that pools voter lists and other data sets to identify voters who should be removed from the rolls, as well as those who may be eligible but unregistered. The program has faced a wave of pushback from conservatives who argued that the program was too focused on finding potentially eligible voters and not enough on identifying ineligible voters.
Voters often fail to cancel outdated registrations when moving, leading to duplicate registrations across state lines that programs like ERIC and EleXa are aimed at addressing. Double-voting itself, however, is rare.
Several Republican-led states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, including Ohio, which pulled out in early 2023 at LaRose’s direction. Since then, Ohio and the other states that left ERIC have been entering into data-sharing agreements with each other to try to replace its services.
In response to Pennsylvania’s pushback to the claim it was joining the EleXa program, Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for the Ohio secretary of state’s office, said Pennsylvania had shared its voter file with Ohio and that they were “obviously negotiating the terms of an ongoing agreement to share additional non-public data.”
“We’ve had productive conversations with them and are optimistic we’ll be able to reach a final agreement, as we hope they share the same goal of ensuring election integrity,” Kindle said.
Pennsylvania said the only data that it shared with Ohio is the public version of the voter roll, which can be purchased online for $20 and does not contain the partial Social Security or driver’s license numbers needed to reliably match voters across state lines.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
