Garden State Times

A public interest law firm specializing in voter integrity is keeping the heat on a uncooperative New Jersey secretary of state over voter rolls that the group says has “tens of thousands of errors.”

In federal lawsuit filed in May, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is charging that New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way, a Democrat, is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) for refusing to disclose documentation explaining how election officials are working to resolve duplicate voter registrations. The NVRA, enacted in 1993, requires states to scrub their voter registration lists of those who have died or moved. PILF has had success invoking the NVRA in suits against other states over errors in their voting rolls.

Earlier this month, PILF released the results of its investigation into the state’s voting rolls, which formed the basis for the lawsuit, PILF spokesperson Lauren Bowman told Garden State Times. Among other irregularities found by the group, 8,239 New Jersey residents were registered twice or more under variations of their names.

“There were individuals registered three, four, five and even six times,” PILF said in a press release announcing the results of the study.

In one startling instance, the rolls listed Patrick DePaola of Bayonne, who died in 2010 at 105, as a registered voter.

In March, the secretary of state’s office turned down PILF’s request under the state’s Open Public Records Act to inspect “copies of all manuals, guidance, instructions and other written procedures for identifying, merging and/or canceling duplicate voter registration records.”

Then in April, Bowman said the secretary of state’s office did not respond to a PILF request asking for a meeting to discuss the errors in the voter rolls.

In PILF’s most recent court victory, a federal judge ruled in April that the group is entitled to review Pennsylvania Department of Transportation documents related to what the department referred to as a “glitch” in a voter registration program that has allowed foreign nationals to register to vote for decades.

And in May, PILF filed a federal lawsuit against Minnesota over duplicate registrations in its voting rolls. In its suit, PILF cited the 2002 Help America Vote Act, since Minnesota is exempt from the NVRA.

A spokesman for the New Jersey secretary of state said they don't comment on pending litigation.