DOJ Sues Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin and DC, Expanding Campaign of Voter Data Lawsuits to 22

The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. Thursday for unfettered access to the states’ voter registration records.

The federal government has now filed lawsuits against 21 states, plus D.C., demanding registrants’ unredacted private information — including driver license numbers, social security numbers and dates of birth — in a campaign decried by local officials and legal experts as an unconstitutional attack on states’ authority to run elections and an illegal attempt to create an unprecedented national voter database. 

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon heralded the lawsuit against Georgia in recent interviews, complaining that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) had told her to “pound sand” in response to her voter data demands. 

The DOJ has demanded this unparalleled access to voter rolls from every state. In a press release, the agency announced that three GOP-led states — Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — would join Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio in handing over the voter data. According to the statement, the total number of states “either in full compliance or in the process of compliance” is now 10.

In an interview last week, Dhillon said there were 12 states in the process of negotiating memoranda to turn over the records, in addition to the four that had already.

But most state officials have echoed Raffensberger and Maine’s Secretary of State, Shana Bellows, who told the federal agency to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”   

The Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin and D.C. lawsuits are nearly identical to the 18 others already filed against state election officials in the past few months. Georgia is the second state with a Republican governor to be sued, and the third with a Republican secretary of state. 

In each lawsuit, the DOJ claims that the 1960 Civil Rights Act gives the Attorney General “sweeping” authority to demand election registration records for “inspection, reproduction and copying.” The DOJ argues it needs the full, unredacted voter files in order to ensure that states are properly maintaining registration records under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

The lawsuit against Georgia is particularly striking, given that under Raffensberger the Peach State has conducted some of the most aggressive voter roll purges in the nation, removing hundreds of thousands of registrations at a time. 

Wisconsin is one of six states Congress exempted from the NVRA. In that lawsuit, the DOJ claims authority to access voter rolls under the Help America Votes Act.

The DOJ has shared the voter data it has received with the Department of Homeland Security, which has incorporated it into its Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, without filing the necessary regulatory notices required by federal law. In a recent social media video, Dhillon noted that 47.5 million voter records had been “checked,” finding more than 260,000 deceased registrants. 

Dhillon and others have touted such figures to bolster the claim that election fraud — particularly ballots cast by noncitizens and dead voters — is common. But studies show the opposite, and even states that have used SAVE have found infinitesimally few incidents. An audit of Louisiana’s voting records uncovered just 79 incidents of noncitizens voting since the 1980s.

In refusing the DOJ’s demands, states say the agency lacks the authority to compel production of the data and has failed to ensure compliance with federal and state privacy laws. 

Dhillon has promised to sue every state that does not comply with the DOJ’s demands.

The complaint filed by the DOJ in D.C. included drafting comments from voting section trial attorney Brittany E. Bennett, who represented the Georgia GOP in a failed lawsuit that sought to ban the state from using Dominion voting machines.

*This is a developing story that has been updated with additional details throughout.

*Maya Bodinson and Yunior Rivas contributed to this report.