Group files suit in PA and around the U.S. to battle “voter error”

A far-right legal group that is leading a politically charged effort to challenge voting laws across the country filed its latest lawsuit in a Pennsylvania court last week alleging rampant election fraud.

United Sovereign Americans (USA) has filed multiple other suits across the country making similar claims as part of its campaign. The campaign, which began last year in Missouri, has disseminated misinformation, and Pennsylvania State Department officials say the group’s ultimate aim is to sow doubt in the integrity of the upcoming presidential election.

Philadelphia attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr., a former Montgomery County district attorney who was one of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers in his second impeachment trial, and Michael van der Veen, who also represented Trump in his second impeachment, are representing the group in Pennsylvania.

Castor alleges that USA has found numerous errors related to voter registration in the Keystone State, including voters registered at multiple addresses, or dead people with active registrations.

“The commonwealth failed to ensure that … safeguards [for voters] were in place … thus destroying the integrity of the … election and making confidence in the election impossible,” the lawsuit reads. “If the 2022 election performance is repeated in 2024, petitioners and all Pennsylvania voters will suffer damages.”

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, state department officials said the USA group “continue[s] to waste taxpayer money.”

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, is “a frivolous action alleging, without any supporting facts or viable legal theories, a panoply of conspiracy claims advanced by litigants who have repeatedly filed baseless actions rejected by the courts,” a state department spokesperson said. The spokesperson said that the department would respond to the suit “accordingly.”

Since the 2020 election, in which Joe Biden defeated Trump, the onetime reality TV star and his allies have filed dozens of lawsuits to challenge the loss. The Republican National Committee alone has filed election-related lawsuits in nearly half the states, according to the Associated Press.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit, which argues that more than one million of the five million votes recorded in the state’s 2020 election were “uncertain” due to 3.1 million erroneous registration records, reflects “fanciful” allegations of fraud, said Franklin and Marshall College government professor Stephen Medvic, who reviewed the lawsuit at the request of The Inquirer.

“Claiming more than three million voting errors out of five million votes is laughable,” he added. “It’s a wild claim with no basis in fact, and no explanation of how they arrived at that number.

In an interview, Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights advocacy group Common Cause Pennsylvania, said voters should feel confidence in the state’s election process, which is overseen by multiple bipartisan teams of election workers, county commissioners and election officials and is audited by county and state officials.

“It’s really not possible for an error on the voter registration list to turn into a fraudulent vote,” he said.

Experts such as Medvic believe that USA and the RNC may well lose their lawsuits. Last month, a Maryland federal court dismissed USA’s attempt to upend the state’s election administration.

Still, Medvic said, such suits can be trouble for election officials:

“These lawsuits make it harder for election administrators to focus on their jobs, which is running safe and secure elections, because they have to spend so much time dealing with what are, ultimately, frivolous lawsuits.”