The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, saying the federal agency broke the law with its efforts to amass a large centralized voter registry containing sensitive information.
The ACLU and other counsel sued on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based voter rights group Common Cause, and four individuals who say the Trump administration’s massive voter data collection effort has harmed them.
The complaint takes a passing jab at Wyoming and 11 other states that have handed sensitive voter information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
“These states have disregarded the privacy and voting rights of millions of Americans who never consented to disclosing their sensitive personal data to the federal government for undefined purposes and without statutory authorization,” says the complaint.
Wyoming was among the first states to grant the federal agency’s request — a move that led to a Cheyenne-based attorney, George Powers, filing an official complaint for criminal action against Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray.
Powers’ complaint points to a provision of Wyoming election law barring the release of voters’ driver’s license numbers and other personal information, along with correspondence in which Gray indicates to the DOJ that he gave it that information last year.
As for Gray, he has said repeatedly that he worked in “close consultation” with the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office and complied with a lawful request. He also told at least one news outlet that the AG approved the request.
Powers asserts that Gray has waived his right to attorney client privilege by referencing the AG’s reported involvement in this way.
Gray cast Powers’ efforts as “lawfare” from a leftwing attorney, in coordination with “the media.”
'The Democrat States'
Gray reiterated that stance Tuesday.
"This lawsuit shows that left-wing states and their political allies, such as far left groups Common Cause and the ACLU, are panicking after recent reports show that the Department of Justice's review is finding hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on states' voter rolls, meaning these leftwing blue states are in direct violation of multiple federal laws," wrote Gray in an email to Cowboy State Daily.
"The Democrat states continuing to resist are doing so in direct violation of federal law," wrote Gray. "They are now scrambling to stop the Department of Justice's work to ensure states' compliance with federal law, such as (Help America Vote Act), because they know that the DOJ will uncover a massive amount of dead people and non-citizens on these blue states' voter rolls."
Around six Republican-led states are also resisting the Trump administration's demands for sensitive voter data.
"The false claims of the ACLU, left-wing attorneys like George Powers, and left-wing media outlets publishing their lies continue," Gray added.
He asserted that 17 other states, including Wyoming, "have followed the law" by handing over the data.
In the ACLU's complaint, the DOJ's latest figure reflects 19 states acquiescing to its demands. Its earlier tally sat at 17, and the ACLU knew of just 12 compliant states by name.
"I will continue to advance election integrity, as I was elected to do," wrote Gray. "And I will NOT back down to the leftwing tactics of the ACLU, Common Cause, and leftwing attorneys like George Powers."
Causes
The ACLU’s Tuesday complaint points to case law saying the U.S. Constitution provides that only states, not Congress — “and certainly not the President” — may decide who is qualified to vote in federal elections.
The National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) aims to promote voting access and prevent discriminatory and unfair laws against prospective voters, says the complaint.
“But nowhere does the NVRA, or any federal law, contemplate a federal takeover of the States’ voter registration processes – let alone a takeover by the Executive branch — and certainly not in a manner that threatens to decrease lawful electoral participation and harms the voters that federal law seeks to protect,” it adds.
The NVRA was one of the laws on which the DOJ leaned when demanding sensitive voter rolls from the states, along with the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
The ACLU asserts that the federal agency did not follow the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which aims to prevent the government from secretly creating centralized federal information systems.
“Congress established robust safeguards against such ‘interagency computer data banks’ to make it ‘legally impossible for the Federal Government in the future to put together anything resembling a ‘1984’ personal dossier on a citizen,” the complaint says, quoting from the privacy act’s legislative history.
The act bars agencies from keeping dossiers describing how people express their First Amendment rights unless expressly authorized by statute, the complaint adds.
When an agency builds a system of records, it must publish the move in the Federal Register to alert the public and take public comment beforehand, the complaint says.
In a similar vein, the complaint points to another federal law, the Paperwork Reduction act, which lists steps agencies must take before collecting information: evaluate the need for that collection, describe the information sought and develop a plan to collect it, plus alert the public and take public comment beforehand.
The complaint alleges that the federal government is building a centralized voter database of unprecedented scope, at least in part to purge purportedly unlawful voters via ill-fitting investigative tools.
This case is ongoing.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
