Last May, the Trump administration’s Justice Department began an effort to gather complete voter files from almost every state, with the apparent goals of getting states to remove certain voters and amassing a national voter file. Both Republican and Democratic election officials have resisted this attempt by the administration to gather troves of sensitive data and upend the statutory and constitutional framework of elections. The bipartisan refusals underscore the fact that states run our elections, not the federal government.
The attempts to collect voter files are part of the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to undermine future elections. These efforts include targeting election officials and others who defend fair elections, attempting to rewrite election rules, and pardoning the January 6 rioters and elevating election deniers.
The DOJ has now demanded unredacted voter rolls from at least 48 states and the District of Columbia. These files include not only full names, addresses, and birthdates, but also driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. It has also pressured states to allow it to identify individual voters it believes should be removed from the rolls.
The DOJ has since filed 31 lawsuits to compel handover of the full voter rolls — 23 against states with a Democratic chief election official and 8 against states with a Republican chief election official. Another 3 states with a Republican chief election official have publicly refused to provide their unredacted rolls to the DOJ but have not been sued.
In response to the Justice Department’s demands last summer and fall, some states provided the publicly available files, which do not include driver’s license and Social Security numbers — but every state the DOJ sued had refused to provide its unredacted files, which include sensitive voter data. Most states cited privacy concerns related to sharing their full voter rolls and inadequate justification by the DOJ for these sweeping requests. The DOJ’s attempts to use the courts to gain access to these voter files have thus far been unsuccessful: Six courts have issued rulings in these cases, and all six have dismissed the cases, holding that the states did not have to turn over their rolls.
In addition, even among the 13 states that have agreed to turn over their full voter files, most have not agreed to the DOJ’s demands to take over their authority to remove voters from their lists. The DOJ has asked the states that hand over their full voter rolls to sign a “confidential agreement,” which says that the DOJ will analyze the state’s voter rolls and send a list of voters whom the state must remove within 45 days.
It appears that only two (Alaska and Texas) of the 13 states that gave the Justice Department their unredacted voter rolls have signed the agreement proposed by the DOJ. South Carolina signed a version of the agreement, but with the caveat that it would only remove the voters identified by the DOJ after the South Carolina Election Commission independently confirmed that the voters should be removed. It’s unprecedented for a state to allow the DOJ to identify specific voters that a state must remove from its rolls. Doing so would likely result in a violation of federal law and certainly upend the structure for election administration in this country. It is the states — not the federal government — that have the authority and the expertise to register voters who are eligible and remove voters who become ineligible. That’s why even election officials who have agreed to produce their voter rolls have resisted this attempt to allow the federal government to take over their authority to conduct list maintenance.
