
The Trump administration is being sued over its stockpiling confidential voter data.
Some of that includes information on Tennesseans — after Tennessee, along with at least 11 other states, voluntarily handed over the information to the Department of Justice earlier this year. The data includes names, dates of birth, addresses and the last four digits of voters’ social security numbers.
This comes after the Trump administration required all states to submit voter data to compile the information into a single record system and purge ineligible voters. Not all states complied, and the Justice Department, in turn, sued at least 30 states in pursuit of the rolls. WPLN News has reached out to the department for comment.
“The law is clear: states need to give us this information, so we can do our duty to protect American citizens from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release late last year.
But federal judges have dismissed these lawsuits at least six times in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island. In at least two of the rulings, judges have said the federal government is not entitled to un-redacted registration lists.
Now, the DOJ is facing a lawsuit from four individuals — represented by the ACLU, ACLU-District of Columbia, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Protect Democracy and Harvard Law School’s Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic — along with the non-partisan organization Common Cause.
The coalition alleges that the DOJ is violating the constitution by “usurping state authority” ensuring that voter rolls are accurate and up to date. The lawsuit also takes issue with the requirement to hand over sensitive information and claims the database it uses to store voter information faulty — misidentifying U.S. citizens as non-citizens and jeopardizing their right to vote.
“This is a blatant, partisan power grab designed to cast doubt on the validity of our elections and whose vote should be counted,” said Common Cause President, Virginia Kase Solomón. “By attempting to interrogate and exploit voter data for political purposes, President Trump’s DOJ isn’t just threatening the privacy of every American—they are building a system designed to imprison the ballot box and silence millions of eligible voters.”
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Plaintiffs are seeking to block the DOJ from storing the data and want the department to delete the information it has already obtained.