Federal Authorities Demand IL Voter Information

The U.S. Department of Justice is asking Illinois officials to provide federal authorities with voters’ driver’s license numbers and partial social security numbers.

In a letter to Bernadette Matthews, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote that while federal authorities had received the requested statewide voter registration list, it was missing information. The letter, dated Aug. 14, was uploaded online by Capitol News Illinois.

Dhillon cited the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act in making the request “to ascertain Illinois’s compliance with the list maintenance requirements.”

“When providing the electronic copy of the statewide VRL, Illinois must ensure that it contains all fields, which includes the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number as required under the Help America Vote Act (‘HAVA’) to register individuals for federal elections,” Dhillon wrote.

“To the extent there are privacy concerns, the voter registration list is subject to federal privacy protections.”

The state board provided federal authorities with a list that included voters’ names, addresses, ages, jurisdictions and voting history, citing a state statute limiting what can be disclosed from the registration list, according to Capitol News Illinois.

“Any statewide prohibitions are preempted by federal law,” Dhillon wrote in the response letter, giving the board a Thursday deadline to provide the rest of the requested information.

Over the past three months, the justice department's voting section has requested copies of voter registration lists from state election administrators in at least 15 states, according to an Associated Press tally from early August. Of those, nine are Democrats, five are Republicans and one is a bipartisan commission.

The unusually expansive outreach has raised alarm among some election officials because states have the constitutional authority to run elections and federal law protects the sharing of individual data with the government.

It also signals the transformation of the justice department's involvement in elections under President Donald Trump. The department historically has focused on protecting access to the ballot box. Today, it is taking steps to crack down on voter fraud and noncitizen voting, both of which are rare but have been the subject of years of false claims from Trump and his allies.

But the department's requests for voter registration data are more problematic, said Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who teaches at Loyola Law School. That is because of the Privacy Act of 1974, which put strict guidelines on data collection by the federal government. The government is required to issue a notice in the Federal Register and notify appropriate congressional committees when it seeks personally identifiable information about individuals.

Becker said there is nothing in federal law that compels states to comply with requests for sensitive personal data about their residents.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.