In August, the Republican Committee of Chester County mailed a spreadsheet to county officials claiming that a review of the county’s non-juror list had uncovered more than 180 potential illegal voters. The list, derived from people who had been rejected for jury service because they declared they were not U.S. citizens, was presented as evidence that the voter rolls contained non-citizens. To test the claim, an independent election-monitoring organization requested the same public records and reproduced the committee’s matching process.
Recreating the GOP’s matching method
The watchdog first downloaded the county’s non-juror database, which Pennsylvania courts make publicly available when individuals answer a citizenship question on a jury summons. It then cross-checked those names against the state’s master voter roll, looking for exact matches in party affiliation and registration date – the same criteria the GOP reported using. From the resulting pool, the team identified roughly two-thirds of the names for which email addresses could be located through the state’s mail-ballot request list and other public databases.
Emails were sent to the 13 individuals who responded, asking them to confirm their citizenship status, whether they had ever served on a jury, and details of their voter registration. The outreach deliberately omitted the registration dates the state had on record, to avoid biasing answers.
Findings: no illegal non-citizen voters among the sample
All 13 respondents were either naturalized citizens or U.S.-born citizens. Twelve had become citizens before the date they registered to vote, confirming that they were eligible to vote at the time of registration. One respondent appeared to have registered before naturalization, but a follow-up with county staff uncovered a data-entry mistake: a clerk had mistakenly attached an existing voter’s registration date to a new entry sharing the same first name and birthday. The county is correcting the error.
When the findings were shared with Jon Veurink, the county GOP’s executive vice chair, he praised the work, calling it “good detective work” and saying the county would develop a process to ensure non-citizens do not vote, without specifying what that process might entail.
Why the non-juror list is an unreliable tool
The core problem lies in the limited information the non-juror list provides. It contains names and the fact that a person claimed non-citizenship, but it omits birth dates, addresses, driver’s-license numbers, or Social Security numbers – data points essential for reliable record linkage. As a result, two different individuals named “John Smith” could be incorrectly treated as the same person, inflating the appearance of illegal voters.
State officials have warned about this methodological weakness. Geoff Morrow, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, noted that analyses relying on non-juror lists are prone to “inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters.” The department’s guidance explicitly states that such lists are not a useful tool for verifying voter-roll accuracy.
Additional complications arise from the age of the non-juror data. Some respondents who initially indicated non-citizenship later naturalized and subsequently registered to vote, meaning the list can capture a moment in time that no longer reflects current eligibility. Similar experiments in other states, such as Texas and California, have shown that the approach yields unreliable outcomes and often leads to the removal of eligible voters.
Overall, the investigation demonstrates that the Chester County GOP’s claim of widespread non-citizen voting rests on a fragile matching process that can produce false positives. While the committee’s intent to safeguard election integrity is clear, the evidence suggests the chosen method does not reliably identify actual violations.
