In unhinged brief, Wisconsin GOP compares not giving the Trump DOJ voters’ personal data to Jim Crow

The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a disturbing amicus brief Tuesday urging a federal court to force the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hand over the state’s unredacted voter rolls to Trump’s Justice Department. 

The Wisconsin GOP didn’t just file a typical “friend of the court” brief supporting the DOJ’s attempt to seize the state’s unredacted voter rolls. Instead, it delivered a culture war-addled screed complete with typographical errors, segregation-era comparisons, anti-immigrant panic and ad hominem attacks.

Instead of leading with sober legal analysis, the 27-page brief opens with a quote from a “self-help” author, implying that defending privacy rights is an admission of guilt or obstruction.

From the outset, the brief frames anyone opposing the federal demand as corrupt, dishonest or afraid of being exposed.

“Why are so many Democrats and Democrat-aligned interest groups devoting substantial resources and fighting so hard to stop the Attorney General from simply investigating whether (and how many) ineligible voters are on active voter rolls?” the brief asks. “Because they fear what the investigation will discover and the threat that discovery poses to their electoral success and political power. Increasingly fueled by hyperbolic propaganda in today’s political discourse, many have lost touch with common sense and become cognitively blind to obvious truths.”

The argument is less legal reasoning than psychological projection:  If state officials or voting rights groups assert voters’ privacy protections, they must have something to hide.

In reality, Wisconsin already makes much of its voter file public. 

What it does not publicly disclose — and what the DOJ is demanding — are the most sensitive fields in the database. That includes personal identifiers such as birthdates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

The GOP’s brief goes on to portray resistance to handing over this trove of personal data as the modern equivalent of — wait for it — how Southern states attempted to prevent Black people from voting during the Jim Crow era.

“One of the reasons that Congress enacted Title III [of the Civil Rights Act of 1960] was to preempt state and local laws being used to obstruct federal voting rights investigations,” the brief adds. “Like Alabama in the 1950s, Wisconsin attempts to use state law to obstruct the Attorney General’s investigation today.”

The comparison is as inflammatory as it is historically illiterate. The Civil Rights Act provisions cited were designed to stop the destruction of records used to discriminate against Black voters — not to authorize sweeping federal data grabs decades later absent evidence of discrimination.

In one of the most jarring passages, the GOP suggests civil right law is not just outdated, but should now be redeployed to protect “all Americans” from the perceived electoral threat of racial minorities.

“At certain times, the focus [of the Civil Rights Act of 1960] was necessarily on protecting the voting rights of certain racial minorities, but it has unfortunately now become necessary that the Attorney General act to protect the voting rights of all Americans from infringement by non-citizens and other ineligible voters potentially casting illegal votes,” the GOP argues. 

But the rhetoric doesn’t stop there. The filing then pivots to sweeping claims about immigration and alleged threats posed by noncitizens.

“Allowing nearly 10 million (by conservative estimates) foreign nationals into the United States, most of whom entered and remained illegally, directly imperiled numerous rights of Americans, not the least of which includes voting rights,” the Wisconsin GOP wrote. “It has thus become necessary that the Attorney General undertake a Nationwide effort to protect the voting rights of all eligible voters from infringement by ineligible voters.”

The brief offers no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in Wisconsin. 

In fact, it acknowledges elsewhere that there is no evidence of significant noncitizen voting — and then argues that the absence of evidence proves an investigation is needed. In other words, there’s no proof because no one has looked hard enough, and we must look harder because there’s no proof.

When further confronted with privacy concerns, the Wisconsin GOP brushes them off as political theater.

“The unfounded claim that [the Attorney General’s] goal is to create a ‘national voter roll’ is nothing more than a smokescreen obscuring the real concern: what the investigation will reveal,” the brief continues. “If the Wisconsin Elections Commission (‘WEC’) and election officials in other states have nothing to hide, they should instead be forthcoming and put all concerns to rest.”

That “nothing to hide” argument — borrowed from the opening Zig Ziglar quote — collapses a complicated legal dispute into a moral ultimatum: Either comply immediately or be branded suspicious.

Further down, the brief attacks former DOJ officials who filed their own amicus brief — including David Becker, a former DOJ voting attorney and election law expert.

In criticizing him, the filing refers to the “Center for Election and Innovation Research” — a name that does not exist. Actually, the organization Becker founded is the Center for Election Innovation & Research, or CEIR. 

“A brief was filed by so-called ‘Former Employees of the U.S. Department of Justice,’ but these individuals are in fact ideological activists, and many are affiliated with groups advocating for policy preferences directly related to election law and voter registration,” the Wisconsin GOP remarked. “Masquerading as only former DOJ employees, these activists incorrectly claim the Attorney General’s investigation is ‘inconsistent with prior DOJ practice.’”

The GOP casts Becker and other former DOJ officials as shadowy “ideological activists,” yet cannot correctly name the group it accuses of distorting election law.

The attack is personal rather than substantive. It does not grapple with the central question Becker and others have raised on how Title III was ever intended to function.

Instead, the brief frames the matter as a test of loyalty to federal power.

“The privacy concerns raised and demagogic accusations lodged are a pretext to shield ongoing violations of federal law,” the brief concludes. “This court must not allow the obstruction to continue, should deny all motions to dismiss, and grant the Attorney General’s motion to compel.”

And if the rhetoric weren’t enough, the brief undercuts itself with basic errors. It misspells former Attorney General Eric Holder’s first name as “Aric Holder” and mis-cites the Privacy Act — the very federal law governing how agencies must safeguard personal data.

Three different courts have already dismissed similar DOJ lawsuits seeking state voter rolls, underscoring how legally shaky this crusade has been so far. But the Wisconsin GOP’s filing makes clear that, for many in the party, this fight is about something bigger:  casting doubt on elections and portraying the protection of voting rights as proof of corruption.