The Department of Justice sued six states, including Pennsylvania, the nation’s biggest presidential battleground, on Thursday as the Trump administration escalates its efforts to obtain the personal and private information of voters.
The lawsuits, filed against California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, follows similar suits that the department brought against Maine and Oregon, two Democratic-controlled states. All of those states have rebuffed previous demands from the Justice Department to gain access to statewide voter rolls that include sensitive information, such as drivers license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
The six lawsuits are the latest, and most aggressive, step in the Justice Department’s quest to amass the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to make false and unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.
The suits have come as Mr. Trump has sought extraordinary influence over how elections are run, from issuing an executive order intended to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to publicly calling for an end to mail-in voting. The attempts from the executive branch to exert power over elections would upend centuries of settled election law that designates states as the main arbiters of elections; Congress has the power to pass federal voting legislation. Some of Mr. Trump’s actions, including the executive order, have been partly blocked in court.
This summer, more than 30 states received requests from the Justice Department asking for their voter rolls that included drivers license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Publicly available voter lists maintained by the states do not include this information. The department later told a meeting of top election officials that they would be making requests of all 50 states.
The effort by the Trump administration has alarmed election experts and secretaries of state from both parties, in part because it is being led by allies of the president, who as recently as January refused to acknowledge that Joseph R. Biden Jr. fairly won the 2020 election. Election officials have also expressed concern that the data could be misused by political allies of the president, and that it would not be securely protected.
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The post Justice Department Sues Six States Seeking Private Voter Data appeared first on New York Times.
