FILE - Table top voting booths are stored at the Allegheny County Election Division warehouse on the Northside of Pittsburgh, Friday, Nov. 6, 2020. New data from automatic voter registration at Pennsylvania driver’s license centers shows that sign-ups have grown but remain almost evenly divided between the political parties in the presidential battleground state. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
FILE - Table top voting booths are stored at the Allegheny County Election Division warehouse on the Northside of Pittsburgh, Friday, Nov. 6, 2020. New data from automatic voter registration at Pennsylvania driver’s license centers shows that sign-ups have grown but remain almost evenly divided between the political parties in the presidential battleground state. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
The first sign of trouble appeared when Monroe County elections director Sara May-Silfee told a member of her staff to dig an envelope out of the trash.
A bundle of more than 20 voter registration forms arrived at the elections office the weekend before the Oct. 21 registration deadline for the 2024 presidential election. Election officials suspected the forms, several of which had the same handwriting and the same name listed as the person who helped with the form, might not be legit. The envelope the forms arrived in said they came from the Lancaster office of Arizona-based consulting firm Field+Media Corps.
May-Silfee called her counterpart in the Lancaster County elections office, director Christa Miller, to ask if she knew about the group or had seen similar sloppy registration forms.
May-Silfee’s inquiries triggered what would become a multicounty investigation. She referred her county’s forms to their district attorney, called the York County elections office, texted a group chat of other election directors and notified the Department of State, which oversees elections statewide.
In October of this year, state Attorney General Dave Sunday charged six people in Berks, Lancaster and York counties for falsifying registration forms submitted in 2024, and charged Field+Media Corps’ state coordinator for incentivizing canvassers by illegally paying them a per-registration rate. Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso also charged three people in his county, all tied to Field+Media Corps.
The registration forms May-Silfee found last year were exceptional examples of what election directors across Pennsylvania say has been a chronic, mostly noncriminal problem for over a decade.
Every even-numbered election year, when voters choose presidents, governors and legislators, national groups hire temporary staff to find people not yet registered to vote, or who need to update their registration.
Pennsylvania election officials are asking for these groups to be held to some standard of accountability. “Groups that are going out there and registering people, I think they should have to register, like with the state,” May-Silfee said.
She and other election directors told WITF they would like to see a slate of legislative changes, from requiring registration forms be turned in within two weeks of collection and setting penalties for those who do not, to moving to online registration forms rather than paper.
The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, which lobbies the Legislature on behalf of county interests, said it will add changing registration rules to its slate of legislative requests “to address all ambiguities to maximize the efficiency of election administration,” according to spokesperson John Buffone.
Forrest Lehman, election director in Lycoming County, said there’s a lot of noncriminal behavior by third-party voter registration groups that don’t serve voters and exhaust the time of elections staff, like when the groups turn in registration forms months after collecting them. That behavior goes unchanged election after election because there aren’t mechanisms to hold poor performers accountable, Lehman said.
“ Any group that is taking it upon itself to handle a voter registration process and take responsibility for someone registering to vote, there should be some oversight of that,” Lehman said. “If they’re not comfortable with some level of accountability and responsibility for getting people registered to vote, then they should not be in that business.”
An essential service
Third-party voter registration groups “can serve a vital purpose,” said Chris Spackman, Dauphin County’s election director. Annual reports from the Department of State show registration drives were responsible for 295,700 paper applications in 2024, with 71,400 coming from new voters. County election directors say changes in administration and differences between their offices make it difficult to compare the data across time or between counties.
But the quality control among voter registration groups varies, Spackman said. Some groups do a bad enough job that it may disenfranchise voters, he said.
“It’s usually groups I’ve never seen before,” Spackman said. “The ones who are doing it consistently tend to do it good, consistently.”
Dauphin County received Field+Media Corps forms in 2024, Spackman said, but they arrived after the deadline. Spackman referred the late forms to the district attorney, he said, the first time he’s had to do that for voter registration drives. The groups that do a bad job are the ones that show up only during presidential elections, Spackman said.
The main problem, election directors say, is when registration groups hold onto forms for weeks or even months before submitting them.
A person may fill out a registration card with a canvasser, maybe outside a grocery store or at a county fair in June. That person assumes they’re registered, Spackman said, and sometimes mistakenly believes they registered directly with the elections office.
When canvassers wait until the last minute to turn in registration forms, some of which could contain errors, they put those registrations at risk, and people who lose an opportunity to vote as a result could direct their anger at local election offices.
“ When you are holding onto this information for long periods of time, these forms, and dropping them on us on the last day to register to vote, it makes it challenging,” Spackman said. “It creates a bottleneck.”
The office always gets through the stack of last-minute registrations, he said, but election officials are loaded down with other work in the weeks before an election. They are trying to finalize poll books for Election Day check-ins. They are sending out the last mail-in ballots and processing returns. That close to an election, directors and staff regularly put in 12-hour days.
When forms are incomplete, it is very difficult to contact people to provide the necessary information. Lehman, the Lycoming elections director, said his office experiences only about a 30% response rate when they reach out to people to fix registration problems.
What to do
The top priority of Lehman and other election directors is requiring canvassers to return registration forms within two weeks of when they were collected. Many local election groups already do that, in accordance with Department of State recommendations, but it’s not required.
Michelle Mardenborough, executive director of One Vote Counts, said she uses online voter registration to submit the information immediately. Her nonprofit registers voters in Dauphin County. When they register voters in the county jail, who can vote until convicted of a felony, Mardenborough said they have to use paper forms, but they review them within 24 hours and submit them within one or two business days.
Wendy Shaver and Leta Beam run Power to the Hill, another Dauphin County voter registration group. They turn in their paper forms within three business days, Beam said. Spackman said both local groups are well-known to his office. They register people every year, regardless of the races on the ballot, and avoid the pitfalls common to other registration groups.
Even the Voter Registration Project, the national nonprofit that hired Field+Media Corps to register voters in Pennsylvania, had in its contract that forms had to be turned in within 10 days. State prosecutors noted in their presentation of evidence that Field+Media Corps’ staff failed to honor the contract, turning in forms up to five months after they were completed, but that failure itself is not criminal.
The Lancaster and York election offices referred WITF to their county media contacts, who declined interviews with county officials and did not respond to emailed questions. Berks County also did not respond to inquiries.
May-Silfee, in Monroe County, said her office is taking its own measures to ameliorate the problem. When groups turn in forms in person, for instance, May-Silfee’s staff go through each form with the canvassers to make sure the information is correct. When forms have missing or illegible information, they instruct the canvassers to follow up.
Usually, once a registration is processed, it’s impossible to track it back to the group that submitted the form. May-Silfee said her office is now going to require canvassing groups to mark every form so her office will always know who turned in which registrations.
Without changing the law, registration groups could immediately improve their success rates and reduce frustrations in local election offices just by choosing to register people online, May-Silfee said.
“ The online thing is absolutely fabulous,” she said.
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