6,665 Pennsylvanians have the right to vote. Nobody told them.
A new PARSOL analysis exposes a 30-point voter registration gap across every Pennsylvania county — and the fix that already exists under current law.
Pennsylvania never took away voting rights from people on the Megan’s Law registry. The problem is that 6,665 of them aren’t registered — and the gap between their registration rate and the general population’s is 30 points wide.
PARSOL matched 17,533 Megan’s Law registry records against Pennsylvania’s 8.9 million-record statewide voter file. What we found is in Silent Citizens: Voting Rights, Registration Gaps, Polling Place Barriers.
Key Findings
The Megan’s Law population registers to vote at a rate 30 percentage points below the general eligible population. We checked all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties. The gap holds in every one of them. This isn’t a Philadelphia problem or a rural problem. It’s a Pennsylvania problem.
Pennsylvania’s Megan’s Law has no proximity restrictions, no residency restrictions, and no voting restrictions. Rights come back automatically upon release. But 54.2% of respondents in a 2024 PARSOL survey had been told their record barred them from voting — and 26% heard that from a government official.
About half of Pennsylvania’s polling places are at schools or churches. Parole and probation conditions commonly restrict exactly those locations. But Pennsylvania Act 77 (2019) gives any registered voter the right to request a mail ballot — no reason needed. Almost nobody in this population knows about it.
Download the Report
We’ll send you the PDF and occasional updates on this work.
About this research
PARSOL matched the February 2026 PA Megan’s Law registry (17,533 permanently housed records) against the full PA SURE voter file (8,943,711 records) using a conservative two-rule matching algorithm. County-level comparisons use the 2022 ACS 5-Year Citizen Voting Age Population as the general population denominator — Census Bureau estimates of US citizens 18 and older, the most rigorous available measure of who is actually eligible to vote.
About PARSOL
The Pennsylvania Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws is Pennsylvania’s affiliate of the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL). We take an evidence-based approach to criminal justice policy, advocating for prevention-based, trauma-informed, and healing-focused approaches rooted in accountability, respect, and fairness.