United Sovereign Americans Files Lawsuit Targeting Pennsylvania’s Voter Rolls
United Sovereign Americans (USA), the nascent right-wing group that’s organizing to disrupt voter rolls across the country, is suing Pennsylvania officials over the state’s voter roll maintenance and voting system accuracy.
The lawsuit, which was filed June 18 by USA along with former GOP state House candidate Ruth Moton and a voter, alleges there were more than a million voting system errors in tabulating the ballots cast in the 2022 election. The plaintiffs claim this number exceeds the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) acceptable allotment of one voting error out of 125,000 votes cast.
The lawsuit also alleges that, during the 2022 election, the state’s voter registration rolls had hundreds of thousands of errors including duplicate registrations, voters with inactive statuses and invalid or illogical registration dates. The plaintiffs allege there was a nearly 10,000-vote discrepancy between the votes cast and the votes counted in the 2022 election in the Keystone State.
This is the second federal lawsuit filed by USA that challenges a state’s voter roll maintenance. In March the group filed a similar lawsuit in Maryland that challenged the state’s voter roll maintenance procedures and other election procedures. In a win for voters, the Maryland lawsuit was dismissed by a federal court in May, but the group appealed the dismissal to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Since USA filed its first Maryland lawsuit, the group has been vocal about its longshot legal strategy to potentially disrupt the 2024 election by filing a series of lawsuits across the country challenging state’s voter rolls and maintenance procedures. In an earlier exposé of the group, Democracy Docket reported on its complementary efforts to train an army of volunteers to convince county elections officials and boards of supervisors to sign a document relating to how they plan to administer elections.
The group’s founder, Marly Hornik, led a previous effort in New York to audit the state’s voter registration rolls, and recruited volunteers to pose as election officials and canvas people’s homes to confirm their voter registration states. The New York attorney general accused the group of violating the federal Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act for intimidating voters and sent them a cease-and-desist.