Carbon County has hired a Stroudsburg law firm to represent the county in a lawsuit that was filed by an election watch group against the state because it believes several Pennsylvania counties have failed to clean their voter rolls.

The commissioners hired Newman Williams PC to represent the county in the action involving Judicial Watch. The cost for attorney Gerard Geiger’s services will be $250 per hour.

County solicitor Daniel Miscavige said that the reason for the action was because Judicial Watch alleges that several election directors in Pennsylvania were violating the National Voter Registration Act by not removing enough inactive people off the voter rolls.

“It’s something that’s been filed nationwide against different states and we happen to be in the mix with that,” Miscavige said.

The original suit was initially filed in April 2020 against the state and three counties - Bucks, Chester and Delaware - saying those counties “failed to make a reasonable effort to remove ineligible voters from their rolls as required by the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993.”

Judicial Watch also filed the same suit in five other states.

The complaint was amended in November 2021 to include the state, as well as Carbon, Luzerne, Cumberland, Washington and Indiana counties and states that these counties have not complied with “their voter list maintenance obligations,” which under NVRA requires counties to make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the officials lists of eligible voters by reason of death or change of address.”

The complaint states that data shows that Carbon County did not remove any ineligible voter registrations from November 2016 through November 2020.

In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a massive voter roll cleanup that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio.

In other election matters, the county approved a proposal from Armstrong Development of West Chester to mail approximately 7,500 of Carbon County’s permanent voter mailing kits for the 2022 election to voters who requested a permanent mail-in ballot.

The cost for the mailings, which does not include return postage, is $3,525.