SPRINGFIELD – Organized labor organizations and voting rights groups in Illinois are seeking to intervene as codefendants in a federal lawsuit in which the Trump administration is seeking access to the state’s complete, unredacted voter registration database, including sensitive personal information about individual voters.

In motions filed Jan. 9 in federal court in Springfield, lawyers representing Common Cause Illinois, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and three individual voters joined the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Voting Rights Project, ACLU of Illinois and the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in seeking to intervene in the case in hopes of blocking the administration from accessing the data.

“The Trump Department of Justice – without proper authorization from Congress – is apparently seeking to create a nationwide database that can be used to harass voters and fuel false claims of voter fraud,” ACLU of Illinois’ Kevin Fee said in a statement Monday. “It is critical that states – including Illinois – resist this illegal effort and protect the privacy of our voters.”

Earlier, Illinois AFL-CIO, the Illinois Alliance for Retired Americans and the Illinois Federation of Teachers filed a similar motion to intervene.

They argued in their motion that they each devote significant resources to registering their members to vote, and they fear the lawsuit could result in a ruling that undermines those efforts.

“DOJ’s actions here threaten to chill its members and constituents from registering to vote, expose them to unlawful purges, and put their private information at risk,” IFT said in the motion.

National push for voter data

Illinois is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C., that are being sued by the Trump administration for access to their unredacted voter rolls. The U.S. Department of Justice filed the Illinois case Dec. 18 following months of efforts to obtain the information directly from the Illinois State Board of Elections.

DOJ has said it wants access to “all fields” in the database, including each voter’s complete name, street address, date of birth and either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

In August, the state board gave DOJ a partially redacted registration list – the same list it makes available to political parties and campaigns – which does not include complete street addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers. The board said both state and federal privacy laws preclude it from releasing the unredacted database.

According to a tracking tool maintained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute at the New York University School of Law, DOJ has requested unredacted voter data from at least 43 states and Washington, D.C. Most, like Illinois, have provided partially redacted lists or have provided no data at all.

Eight states – Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming – have reportedly handed over their unredacted lists or indicated that they will.

Maintaining accurate voter rolls

In their correspondence with Illinois officials and documents filed in court, DOJ officials have suggested they need the unredacted lists to enforce provisions of federal laws that require states to properly maintain accurate and up-to-date voter rolls.

Federal officials specifically cite provisions of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “motor voter” law that require states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters,” either because the voter has died or moved to a different address.

But legal experts, including two attorneys who formerly worked in the Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, argue DOJ has only limited legal authority when it comes to enforcing NVRA, and no legal authority to access sensitive personal data about individual voters.

“There is just no legal basis for the DOJ to seek sensitive voter data,” David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said Jan. 6 during a media call with reporters. “The DOJ’s jurisdiction is limited to that which Congress specifically authorized, and Congress has never authorized the collection of sensitive voter data that is protected by state law.”

Eileen O’Connor, another former DOJ attorney who now is a senior counsel and manager in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, also said DOJ has only limited authority to enforce NVRA’s list maintenance requirements.

“How that works is, if a state doesn’t have a program in place that complies with the National Voter Registration Act in terms of regularly removing voters who have moved or otherwise become ineligible, the department can bring an enforcement action,” she said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “They don’t get to do the list maintenance. They don’t get to take the voter file and run it against some other databases and say, ‘Here’s who you have to remove.’”

Dangers of data release

Becker and O’Connor both said the release of unredacted voter registration data to DOJ would constitute a significant breach of privacy for millions of Americans and could put their personal data at risk of being hacked.

Becker described the information DOJ is seeking – Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth – as “the holy trinity of identity theft,” while O’Connor described it as “a hacker’s dream.”

But O’Connor also said she believes the Trump administration’s real goal is not just to enforce NVRA’s list maintenance requirements but to take over that process so DOJ can determine who is eligible to vote nationwide.

“I think this is part of an attempted federal takeover, federal incursion into the running of our elections,” she said.

“They’re going to take these voter rolls, do a bunch of matches to databases – we don’t know what databases; don’t know how accurate they are, how up-to-date they are – and send lists back to the states and tell them, ‘You have to remove these voters.’”

The case is pending in U.S. District Court in the Central District of Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.