On March 2, 2026, the United States Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in Public Int. Legal Found. v. Schmidt.  The Supreme Court’s decision secures a major victory for Dan Brier and Donna Walsh who defended the Commonwealth in an eight-year-long effort by PILF to compel the production of records relating to registrants on Pennsylvania’s voting rolls.

In 2017, PILF requested documents concerning registrants on the Pennsylvania voter rolls with indicators in their PennDOT driver license records suggesting that they were non-citizens at one point in time.  The request, which was made under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), followed PennDOT’s correction of a software error that inadvertently offered a voter registration screen to users regardless of citizenship status.

On behalf of the Commonwealth, MBK opposed the request on numerous grounds, including that PILF lacked standing to sue in federal court because it was an out-of-state organization with no connection to any Pennsylvania voter and no particularized need for the records.  The district court rejected the standing argument, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed and ruled in a precedential decision that PILF did not have standing because it suffered no concrete harm from not having access to the records.  Donna Walsh successfully argued the case in the Third Circuit.

The decision is reported at Public Int. Legal Found. v. Sec’y of Commonwealth of Pa., 136 F.4th 456 (3d Cir. 2025).