Trump administration demands state voter data, including partial Social Security numbers
By Fredreka Schouten, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration has stepped up efforts to obtain personal information about tens of millions of voters across the country, including seeking sensitive data such as partial Social Security numbers.
The push, overseen by the Department of Justice, comes as President Donald Trump asserts a larger federal role in elections ahead of next year’s midterms, which are set to determine which party controls Congress during his last two years in the White House.
In recent weeks, state election officials have received letters from Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, seeking unredacted copies of states’ voter registration databases. The information includes voters’ names, birthdates, addresses, and driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
The agency has told states that the information is necessary to ensure compliance with a federal law that requires states to maintain accurate voter registration rolls.
But some state officials who have received the missives argue that the Justice Department is overstepping its authority, given that states, and not the federal government, run elections and carry out voter-roll maintenance. Election officers in several states are refusing to comply with the demands, citing the need to guard voters’ privacy.
“We’re going to fight as far as we have to against this,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told CNN in an interview. “I’m not going to give up the personal identifying information of my voters. It’s just not going to happen.”
State officials such as Fontes say they already have procedures in place to review the accuracy of their voting lists on a rolling basis. Any dataset about voters that states might send to the federal government would offer just a snapshot in time of a state’s voting population, and the information quickly becomes out of date, he added.
In Pennsylvania, the state’s top election official, Al Schmidt, also is declining to share voters’ sensitive personal data. In a letter he wrote to Dhillon, Schmidt called the DOJ’s request a “concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process.”
In addition to Arizona and Pennsylvania, election chiefs in California, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota and Oregon have also received the recent data requests from the Justice Department, officials in those states have told CNN.
Michael Kang, an election law expert at Northwestern University, said it’s not clear why the Justice Department needs the information it seeks.
“I don’t think you need people’s Social Security numbers for voter-list maintenance oversight,” he said.
DOJ officials did not respond to inquiries. But in a previous statement to CNN, Dhillon noted that her division has a “statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws.”
“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” she said at the time.
The letters test what federal law requires of states
Federal law gives the Justice Department the authority to ensure that states have procedures to maintain their voter rolls and remove those who have died, moved or are otherwise not eligible to vote where are registered. The law does not specifically give the DOJ the power to manage the lists.
Dhillon’s letters also cite a federal civil rights statute enacted in 1960 that gives the Justice Department broad authority to inspect election records.
The new requests have aroused suspicion among some Democratic officials that the administration is seeking data to advance claims of voter fraud in upcoming elections.
“They are looking, essentially, to say that, ‘Well, we found somebody who died who’s still on the rolls, and therefore there’s fraud, and therefore these elections are fraudulent and should be overturned,’” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters recently, according to Capitol News Illinois.
Since May, the Justice Department has contacted at least 26 states, seeking a broad array of information ranging from voter rolls to the identities of election officials responsible for maintaining them, according to a tracker maintained by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
Election officials in several states responded to earlier DOJ requests this summer for voter data by providing information generally available to the public or to political committees and removing sensitive personal details about individual voters. The new letters from Dhillon make explicit that the DOJ wants states to provide “all fields” – including personal information – contained in their voter registration datasets to the federal government.
The DOJ has told the National Association of Secretaries of State – the umbrella organization for state election chiefs – that it plans outreach to all 50 states, according to the association’s spokesperson, Maria Benson.
“Americans should be very concerned” about the agency’s moves, said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s voting rights section.
“The DOJ is asking states to take this data, which they are charged under federal and state law with protecting, and hand it over for unclear reasons and with no clear indications of how it will be used,” Becker said.
Justin Riemer, a veteran Republican election lawyer who runs Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, said that the Justice Department “has every right to enforce federal voting laws” and seeking access to the complete voter rolls is one method of doing so.
“I’m not 100% sure you can determine whether or not a state is following laws to remove ineligible voters and keep the voter rolls current without actually reviewing the contents of voter registration lists,” he said.
J. Christian Adams is the president and general counsel of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has repeatedly challenged the accuracy of states’ voter lists. Adams called the resistance to the federal requests a sign of “Trump derangement syndrome.”
“The Attorney General has the power to say, ‘Show me your work,’” he told CNN. “This is not a close call.”
Trump is ramping up pressure on election officials ahead of the midterms
Trump has moved to insert himself into elections, falsely asserting that states must obey his orders despite the Constitution not giving the president any explicit authority to regulate elections. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do,” he wrote in a recent post on Truth Social.
A Trump executive order earlier this year instructed the Department of Government Efficiency to assist in a review of state voter rolls to identify potential noncitizens. The directive, which also demands proof of citizenship to register to vote, is facing several legal challenges and parts of it have been blocked temporarily by the courts. Over the weekend, Trump said he would sign an executive order requiring voter identification for elections.
He has also tried to give his party an edge in next year’s midterms by urging GOP-controlled states to redraw congressional maps to eke out more US House seats for Republicans. Missouri is holding a special legislative session starting Wednesday to target one of the state’s two Democrat-held seats. Texas already passed a new map which will likely give Republicans five more seats.
The confrontation over access to voter data is likely to end up in court. The Justice Department opted to sue Orange County, California, as part of a federal probe into alleged non-citizen voting. Orange County officials have so far declined to share the individuals’ personal information with DOJ without a court order.
In Minnesota, Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon is refusing to share voters’ personal information. A group of Republican state lawmakers on an elections panel recently urged Simon to relent, arguing he is setting up the state for “costly” litigation with the federal government.
Simon said he’s not backing down and was confident Minnesota would win in court.
“I don’t have a sense at this point what the Justice Department really wants and aims to do with this data,” he said. “A reasonable person could conclude that the stated reason they want the information isn’t the real reason they want the information.”
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