BOSTON — The Trump administration is taking Massachusetts to court for refusing to turn over sensitive voter registration data ahead of next year’s midterm election.
In a federal lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, the Justice Department accuses Secretary of State Bill Galvin of refusing to turnover a list of the state’s registered voters — including addresses and partial Social Security numbers — to the agency’s Office of Civil Right’s for its probe of state election policies.
The federal agency claimed that Galvin is violating the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act by refusing to comply with the demands, asking a federal judge to force his elections division to turn over the information.
Nearly identical complaints were filed Thursday against election officials in Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada, according to the DOJ, all of which accused them of “jeopardizing the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws.”
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Galvin dismissed the DOJ’s legal challenge and said he has “absolutely no intention” of handing over sensitive voter data “to an administration that has demonstrated a pattern of using citizens’ private information to go on outrageous fishing expeditions in an attempt to settle petty grievances.”
“This lawsuit is simply another example of the Trump Department of Justice’s campaign to intimidate states into handing over the personal information of their voters to the federal government,” Galvin, a Democrat, said in a statement. “DOJ has provided no meaningful justification for needing access to every Massachusetts voter’s personally identifiable information.”
Attorney General Andrea Campbell also criticized the DOJ lawsuit and vowed to defend Galvin’s office against the claims.
“The privacy of Massachusetts voters is not up for negotiation,” the Democrat said in a statement. “My office will work with Secretary Galvin to vigorously defend against the Trump Administration’s attempt to misuse voters’ personal information as fuel for its cruel and harmful agenda.”
Massachusetts is one of the latest states to be targeted by the DOJ’s Civil Rights division, which has sent letters to dozens of states demanding sensitive voter data that the federal agency has said is needed to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act.
The move follows President Donald Donald Trump’s widely challenged executive order in March that called for new requirements to register to vote, along with a range of voting policies long supported by Republican lawmakers.
Several states, including Maine and New Hampshire, have rejected the request, while others have said they are still reviewing it.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, is among those who have rebuffed the Trump administration’s demands, responding to the request by telling the Justice Department to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine” and saying she won’t comply.
In many cases, the DOJ has asked state elections officials for lists with the voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, political party affiliation, phone numbers, driver’s license numbers, and last four digits of their social security numbers.
They’ve also asked election officials to describe how they identify people who are convicted felons, deceased, or non-citizens, and the process of removing them from their voter lists.
To date, the DOJ has filed lawsuits against 18 states over their refusal to turn over the data.
The DOJ’s lawsuit against Massachusetts comes amid an ongoing federal court challenge alleging that Galvin’s office is violating a provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, requiring states to publicly share how they maintain their voter lists for a period of at least two years.
Those legal challenges are part of a push by conservative groups who are challenging the legitimacy of large numbers of voter registrations across the country.
Those groups have filed hundreds of public records requests across the country seeking to gain access to voter files, many of them stemming from President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. In most states, the disputes are still working their way through the courts.