Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday has announced charges against seven people in connection with a fraudulent voter registration scheme. The case serves as another example of vulnerabilities in the U.S. election systems and highlights why our system should not allow third parties to handle voter registration requests.
According to police criminal complaints, workers who were hired to collect voter registration requests were given a quota to meet. Some workers told investigators they would be fired if they did not turn in enough requests, so they handed in bogus registrations, according to the complaints.
As the ground game for the 2024 presidential election picked up steam in the final weeks last year, election workers focused on swing states like Pennsylvania, with its 19 vital electoral votes. It was said the presidency could not be won without Pennsylvania, and the presidential winner did take Pennsylvania, with Donald Trump declaring victory soon after winning the state.
For months before Election Day, the state was teaming with organized canvassers urging low-propensity voters to register to vote. As counties received loads of daily registration forms and worked to verify the requester’s identity, several counties noticed a troubling pattern.
In Lancaster County, officials received around 2,500 voter registration requests in about a week that came in two large batches. County election workers noticed some had the same handwriting, many shared the same date, and some had other anomalies, as The Federalist reported last year.
“The county investigated and found 60 percent were confirmed as ‘fraudulent,’ according to Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams.” She indicated the fraudulent applications were part of a larger operation that began in June 2024.
Similar reports came out of neighboring Berks and York counties. Officials said the bogus registration requests were related to workers canvassing “at shopping centers, parking lots of grocery stores and businesses, sidewalks, and parks.”
Sunday took the case from the county district attorneys, and last week the Office of Attorney General charged Guillermo Sainz, 33, of Sierra Vista, Arizona, with three counts of Solicitation of Registration, that is, allegedly giving workers quotas to meet. Sainz “served as director of a company’s registration drive efforts in Pennsylvania,” Sunday’s statement reads. Each count carries a fine of at least $500 or “imprisonment for not less than one month” or both.
The criminal complaint names the company as Field and Media Corps. Sainz’s LinkedIn account showing his work history there has been removed.
Everybody Votes
In its release the attorney general’s office did not name the left-leaning Everybody Votes as the funding arm behind Field and Media Corps activities in Pennsylvania, and the office stressed that the operation was nonpartisan and that both companies cooperated with the investigation, which started in October 2024.
“The operation was funded by a national voter registration organization (hereafter referred to as NVRO) that is known to your affiant,” the AG’s complaint against Sainz reads. That NVRO, Everybody Votes, had a contract with Field and Media Corps for initial funding and the possibility of continued funding based in part on goals for the number of voter registrations requested. That contract prohibited the pay-per-registration compensation that is alleged, according to the complaint.
“The Office of Attorney General determined that the crimes were not motivated by efforts to sway any election or voter rolls for any specific party or candidate. Rather, the charged defendants were motivated to maintain employment and income by reaching quotas,” the statement said. “The voter registration forms collected by Sainz’s operation included all party affiliations.”
“We are confident that the motive behind these crimes was personal financial gain, and not a conspiracy or organized effort to tip any election for any one candidate or party,” Sunday said in the statement.
Notably, as the 2020 Zuckbucks scheme revealed, “get out the vote” efforts need not be explicitly partisan in order to achieve partisan goals and effects. According to InfluenceWatch, Everybody Votes (also known as the Voter Registration Project) ” is a voter mobilization group which targets … voter groups likely to lean left-of-center.”
Criminal Backgrounds
The six accused street canvassers who worked under Sainz face charges of unsworn falsification, tampering with public records, forgery, and two crimes under the Pennsylvania elections code and voter registration law. They are Amos Clay, 33; Joseph Jameson, 42; Anya McCurdy, 22; Meghan McDevitt, 35; Richard Perez, 32; and Samantha Szukiewicz, 36, who was also charged with identity theft.
Some of the workers had low-level criminal backgrounds before they were hired. According to Pennsylvania public court summaries, Clay pled guilty for driving while his license was suspended or revoked in 2022; Jameson was charged with public drunkenness in 2019; Szukiewicz faced charges of writing bad checks in 2020 and drug charges in 2022; was found guilty of retail theft in 2023; and pled guilty to public drunkenness and providing false identification to law enforcement in 2024.
The voter registration request directs wannabe voters to write in their driver’s license or Social Security number on the form. Perhaps temp workers with criminal backgrounds are not the right people to handle such information. It would be more secure, not only for election integrity, but also for personal security, to require voter registration in person only.
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