Illinois elections board refuses to give DOJ sensitive voter data

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois State Board of Elections said this week it will not hand over to the Trump administration a copy of the state’s complete, unredacted voter registration database, citing state laws that require the agency to protect voters’ sensitive personal information.

In a letter Tuesday to the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, ISBE general counsel Marni Malowitz said releasing the data would expose Illinois voters to unnecessary risks.

“We take Illinoisans’ privacy very seriously; data breaches and hacking are unfortunately common, and the disclosure of sensitive information contrary to state law would expose our residents to undue risk,” Malowitz wrote.

Illinois is reportedly one of several states that DOJ has asked to turn over entire voter registration databases, including sensitive personal information such as dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.

DOJ has said it wants the information in order to enforce federal requirements that states maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration lists. But state elections officials have said they are precluded under state law from releasing sensitive information contained in the registration files.

In August, state officials sent DOJ a copy of the same type of data file it shares with political committees and other government agencies. That file includes voters’ names, addresses and their age at the time they registered, but not their date of birth, driver’s license, state ID or Social Security number.

But DOJ wrote back on Aug. 14 saying that was not good enough. It demanded the state turn over its entire database, with “all fields, including 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.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the elections board had not indicated whether it had received a response from the Justice Department to its latest letter.

DOJ has said it wants the information to determine whether Illinois is complying with requirements under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the 2003 Help America Vote Act to keep the voter registration lists accurate and up to date. That includes occasionally purging from the voter rolls the names of people who have died or moved.

Read It: Illinois State Board of Elections letter to DOJ

But DOJ has also asked Illinois to identify the number of registered voters who have been removed from the rolls for other reasons, such as not being U.S. citizens, being adjudicated incompetent, or for felony convictions.

David Becker, a former DOJ attorney in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division who now directs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said during a media briefing Wednesday that the federal agency has only limited authority to enforce the list maintenance requirements of those laws.

“The DOJ has sole authority to require that the states engage in a general, reasonable program of list maintenance,” he said. “What the DOJ can’t do is say, ‘Remove Jane Doe, but keep John Doe on.’ That is the role of the states and states alone.”

He also said the department has no legal authority to demand voters’ sensitive personal information and it would have little use for the information even if it could have access to it.

“The DOJ could not possibly, even if they had it, conduct better list maintenance than the states are currently doing,” he said. “The most valuable asset that (states) have is their DMV database, which the federal government does not have access to. So even if they had a legal authority to gain this data, it wouldn’t do them any good, and they don’t have the legal authority to get this data.”

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.

Peter Hancock

Peter was one of the founding reporters with Capitol News Illinois. He came to Springfield after many years working in Topeka, Kansas, where he covered the Kansas statehouse and other beats. He began his reporting career in 1989 at a small county weekly newspaper and has worked in a variety of settings including both daily and nondaily newspapers, online media and public radio. A native of the Kansas City area, he has degrees in political science and education from the University of Kansas.