The Trump administration has stepped up its efforts to obtain personal information on tens of millions of voters across the country, including seeking sensitive data such as partial Social Security numbers.
These efforts, overseen by the Justice Department, come as President Donald Trump emphasizes a greater federal role in next year’s midterm elections, which are expected to determine which party controls Congress during his final two years in the White House.
In recent weeks, state election officials have received letters from Harmeet Dhillon, supervisor of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, requesting unredacted copies of state voter registration databases. This information includes voters’ names, dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
The agency informed the states that this information is necessary to ensure compliance with a federal law requiring states to maintain accurate voter registration records.
But some officials in the states that received these letters believe the Justice Department is overstepping its authority, given that states, not the federal government, administer elections and maintain voter registration records. In several states, election officials are refusing to comply with these requirements, citing the need to protect voter privacy.
“We will fight this tooth and nail,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a CNN interview. “I will not release any personally identifiable information about my constituents. It’s simply not going to happen.”
State officials, like Fontes, say they already have procedures in place to continually verify the accuracy of their voter registration records. He added that the election data states could share with the federal government would only provide a snapshot of the number of voters in a state, and that this information would quickly become outdated.
In Pennsylvania, Al Schmidt, the state’s top election official, also refuses to share sensitive voter data. In a letter to DeHillon, Schmidt called the Justice Department’s request “a disturbing attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our nation’s electoral process.”
In addition to Arizona and Pennsylvania, election officials in California, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon have also recently received data requests from the Justice Department, officials in those states told CNN.
Michael Kang, an election law expert at Northwestern University, said it was unclear why the Justice Department needed the requested information.
“I don’t believe citizens’ Social Security numbers are necessary to oversee voter registration,” he said.
Justice Department officials did not respond to requests for comment. However, in a previous statement to CNN, Dehillon emphasized that her department has “a legal mandate to enforce federal voting rights laws.”
“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are essential to 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 Justice Department has informed the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASE), the organization that represents state election officials, of its intention to contact all 50 states, according to Maria Benson, a spokeswoman for the association.
“Americans should be deeply concerned” by the agency’s actions, said David Baker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Division.
“The Justice Department is asking states to take this data, which they are required to protect under federal and state law, and turn it over for unclear reasons and without any clear indication of its use,” Baker added.
Justin Riemer, a veteran Republican election lawyer and leader of the organization Restore Integrity and Confidence in Elections, said the Justice Department has “every right to enforce federal election laws,” and that requesting access to the full voter rolls is one way to do that.
“I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to determine whether a state is complying with laws designed to remove ineligible voters and keep its voter rolls up to date without examining the contents of its voter rolls,” he said.
C. Christian Adams is president and general counsel of the Public Interest Law Foundation, a conservative organization that has repeatedly challenged the accuracy of state voter rolls. Adams called resistance to federal requests a sign of “Trumpian derangement.”