SPRINGFIELD – The U.S. Department of Justice is insisting Illinois election officials hand over the state’s entire computerized voter registration database, including sensitive information such as driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.
In a letter dated Thursday, Aug. 14, an attorney in the department’s Civil Rights Division rejected the Illinois State Board of Elections’ offer of a partially redacted database – the same data that state law allows political committees and other governmental agencies to access – insisting that federal authorities are entitled to the complete, unredacted data.
“We have received Illinois’s statewide voter registration list (“VRL”),” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon wrote. “However, as the Attorney General requested, the electronic copy of the statewide VRL must contain 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.”
The letter indicated DOJ was making the request under a provision of the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “Motor Voter Act,” a 1993 law that was intended to make it easier for people to register whenever they conducted other government business such as obtaining a driver’s license or renewing their vehicle registration.
“Our request is pursuant to the Attorney General’s authority under Section 11 of the NVRA to bring enforcement actions,” the letter stated.
The letter also cited the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Passed in the wake of the controversial 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, that law made sweeping changes to the nation’s voting processes, including new requirements about how states must maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration databases.
‘Not entitled to demand’
DOJ first requested a copy of the Illinois database in a July 28 letter. That was a few weeks after the agency filed what’s known as a “statement of interest” in a civil lawsuit that the conservative legal activist group Judicial Watch, along with other plaintiffs, had filed against the state board, alleging it was not meeting its duties under HAVA to maintain the voter database.
In that initial letter, DOJ also requested the names of all election officials in the state who are responsible for maintaining the registration list. It also asked the state to identify the number of people removed from the registration list during the 2022 election cycle because they were noncitizens, adjudicated incompetent or due to felony convictions.
David Becker, a former attorney in the DOJ’s voting section who now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Capitol News Illinois last month that the letter is similar to requests filed in multiple other states and that it goes far beyond the Justice Department’s legal authority.
“The Department of Justice asked for the complete voter file for the state of Illinois, including all fields in that file, which is an absolutely huge file that contains so much sensitive data about Illinois citizens, including driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth that the Department of Justice is not entitled to receive and not entitled to demand,” he said in an interview. “They know this. Other states have told them this, and yet they continue to seek to receive this information, citing sections of federal law that don’t apply and don’t require that.”
Illinois’ initial response
The State Board of Elections responded to that request Aug. 11 with answers to DOJ’s questions as well as an electronic copy of what it described as the statewide voter registration list.
However, the board also cited a state statute that limits what the agency can disclose from the centralized registration list.
A spokesperson for the board said in an email that the law allows the release of two types of data files. One, available only to political committees or “a governmental entity for a governmental purpose,” includes the voters’ names and addresses, their age at the time the registration was completed, the voting jurisdictions in which they reside, and their voting history. That includes elections in which they voted and, in the case of primary elections, which party’s ballot they selected.
That is the list the state board provided to DOJ. The board also waived the normal $500 fee it charges for providing the list.
Another version of the file, available to the general public, contains much of the same information, but only the name of the street on which they live, not their exact street address.
But neither file, the spokesman said, contains voters’ personal identification information used to verify voter registrations such as driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers.
DOJ, Pritzker respond
In its letter Thursday, however, DOJ said the list that the elections board provided was insufficient.
“In charging the Attorney General with enforcement of the voter registration list requirements in HAVA and the NVRA, Congress plainly intended that DOJ be able to conduct an independent review of each state’s list,” Dhillon wrote. “Any statewide prohibitions are preempted by federal law.”
The letter directed the board to provide the information by Aug. 21.
The board spokesman said the latest DOJ letter is “under review.”
Pritzker declined to say whether the board’s decision to provide the partially redacted database was the correct one. But he also accused the Trump administration of ulterior motives.
“Well, it’s clear why they’re hunting around for voter data, right? They’re trying to say that in the next election, that there will be fraud because they know they’re going to lose,” he said at an unrelated bill signing. “They are looking, essentially, to say that, well, we found somebody who died who’s still on the rolls, and therefore there’s fraud, and therefore these elections are fraudulent and should be overturned.”
He also defended Illinois’ decentralized election system.
“We have, actually, one of the safest, best systems in the entire country, because it’s run by individual county clerks so it’s unhackable,” he said.
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.