On Feb. 3, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island filed a brief in federal court fighting the Department of Justice’s September request for access to the state’s non-public voter file, which includes voters’ full birthdates, portions of social security numbers and driver’s license numbers.
Last year, the DOJ requested unredacted voter files from nearly every state, a request which over 20 states — including Rhode Island — refused. The DOJ has since sued a number of states in pursuit of the records.
In December, the ACLU and ACLU of Rhode Island filed a motion to intervene — a request to join as a party in a lawsuit — on behalf of Common Cause Rhode Island.
Common Cause Rhode Island felt it was important to intervene “to protect private data from an administration that has a poor record of data privacy,” the organization’s Executive Director, John Marion, wrote in an email to The Herald.
The ACLU is also representing several individual voters, including “a naturalized citizen and a person who recently moved from out of state and re-registered to vote in Rhode Island,” Executive Director of the ACLU of Rhode Island Steven Brown wrote in an email to The Herald.
“Voters like these are particularly threatened by the federal government’s efforts, as faulty data matching could easily be used to wrongfully disenfranchise them,” reads an ACLU R.I. press release.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in a Sept. 8 letter to Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore, that the federal government’s request aims “to ascertain Rhode Island’s compliance with the list maintenance requirements” mandated by the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Acts.
In a Sept. 16 response, Amore wrote that he would provide the publicly available voter rolls to the federal government, but wrote that he “must protect the personally identifiable information of Rhode Island voters” and will not provide the requested information without “a proper legal basis to do so or a court order.”
But Dhillon wrote in an email to The Herald that “clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair and transparent elections.” She added that “the DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws.”
In Dhillon’s Sept. 8 letter to Amore, she cited Section 301 of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — which “requires state and local officials to retain and preserve records related to voter registration” — as justification for the federal government’s data requests.
But Ari Savitzky ’06, senior staff attorney for the ACLU Voting Rights Project, criticized this claim. He instead defined the Civil Rights Act as “a statute that was created to help the Kennedy administration enforce civil rights laws in the Jim Crow South” and added that the federal government is using this law “in a totally inappropriate context.”
Steven Brown accused the federal government of having “ulterior motives” for filing these requests — including the intention to “run flawed data-matching programs to challenge the voting status of legitimate voters.”
He added that including voters’ sensitive information in a national database would make their data “much more vulnerable to hackers.”
Savitzky ’06 expressed concern that DOJ lawsuit victories could give the federal government the ability to “claim that the results of elections” in states were “tainted.”
“The result would be, if (the) DOJ prevails, that they would then be able to take all this data and use it to try to challenge voters, disenfranchise voters,” Savitzky said.
Savitzky described the requests as a “massive, massive overreach” by the federal government. He emphasized that “our elections are and have always been run by the states.”
The ACLU of R.I. expects the court to schedule a hearing in the “near future” in response to their brief urging dismissal of the case, Brown wrote.
Savitzky commended the decisions made by California and Oregon courts in similar cases, where both states dismissed their respective DOJ lawsuits. To him, these rulings make it “very clear that the federal government does not have the authority to do this.”
“This is a threat to voters’ privacy rights,” Savitzky said. “It’s a threat to free and fair elections.”
Annika Melwani is a metro senior staff writer covering state politics and justice. She is from New York City and plans on concentrating in English and International and Public Affairs. In her free time, she can be found reading or drinking an iced vanilla latte.
