For an orderly vote

Audit of state rolls should be wide-ranging

State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has announced plans to give the state’s voter registration and electionmanagement system the once-over to minimize the risk of hacking and other abuse during the 2020 election.

The audit is welcome. But Mr. DePasquale should focus on the wide range of threats to election integrity, not merely foreign interference, and at some point he should turn his attention to the hodgepodge of voting machines used by the state’s 67 counties.

The audit shouldn’t be all about preventing fraud, either. The Department of State asked for the review to help it determine what it needs in a new registry it’s looking to buy in a few years.

Mr. DePasquale’s audit will look at the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, commonly known as SURE, which maintains records on about 8 million Pennsylvania voters. It’s much more than a static list.

SURE is a sprawling operation with portals for counties, for state officials and for residents who want to register online. In a 2016 report, the Department of State said SURE “supports the critical functions of the commonwealth’s elections — from determining voter eligibility to maintaining precinct data to producing poll books.”

In announcing the audit, which will cover January 2016 to the present, Mr. DePasquale highlighted the threat of foreign powers hacking into the registry. “There is zero question that Russians tried to interfere with the 2016 election process in Pennsylvania and other states,” he said.

But some risks to election integrity originate much closer to home.

For example, Mr. DePasquale’s audit should see if there’s additional light on a glitch that improperly allowed hundreds of non-citizen immigrants to be added to the rolls while conducting other business at driver licensing centers in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas for years. Residents have the opportunity to register by computer at the centers, but the option should’t have been made available to those ineligible to vote.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration never fully explained the resignation of Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, which occurred about three weeks after news of the improper voter registrationssurfaced last fall. Mr. Wolf called Mr. Cortes’ resignation a personnel matter. It’s actually a matter of public concern given questions about the integrity of the voter registration process, and Mr. DePasquale’s audit should lay out the details onceand for all. Mr. DePasquale’s plan to test the accuracy of SURE data is important for more reasons than one. Voters who move away are no more eligible to cast ballots than immigrants without citizenship status, and leaving their names on the rolls is an invitation for confusion and mischief.

The audit also should look at the processes by which officials learn about voters who have died or relocated and the procedure used to cancel the registration of those who miss a certain number of elections and fail to respond to notices about their status. Are these processes efficient? Are they reliable?

Some voters register through county assistance offices, area agencies on aging and agencies serving people with disabilities. Have those parties done the job properly?

A variety of voting machines are used county by county, and those should be checked for accuracy, too. The state has directed counties to ordernew voting machines by the end of 2019 so that devices providing a paper trail for each ballot will be in place for the 2020 election. It’s unclear whether all counties will meet the deadline, however,and it would be nice to know whether the machines currently in useare doing the job.