Former GOP candidate urges investigation of college’s student data
sharing
[March 28, 2025]
By Catrina Barker | The Center Square contributor
(The Center Square) – A former Illinois GOP House candidate is urging
the U.S. Department of Education to investigate Midwestern colleges in
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois for allegedly sharing
student data with groups boosting left-wing voter efforts.
Desi Anderson, who lost to state Rep. Sharon Chung, D-Bloomington, in
the November 2024 election, ran in a district with four colleges in it.
“I legally cannot have access to [date of births] of students. I cannot
get their mailing address. All that is protected under the federal law
under [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act]. So it makes it very
challenging when you run in a district where you have a ton of college
students to make voter contact,” Anderson told The Center Square. “So
what the Democrats did was they used [non-government organizations] to
funnel that data, because it's against the law for a campaign to have
access to it, or any other individual. No third-party vendor can get
access to that data. It's protected just like a medical record is
protected.”
Anderson filed a complaint with the DOE that demands that the federal
agency enforce the FERPA and immediately act against known violations
tied to the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Anderson said ALL IN is a
sister organization of the larger Civic Nation, a non-profit launched by
former President Barack Obama.
“This is a nationwide issue. You've got over 1,000 universities and
colleges nationwide that engage with ALL IN. In Illinois alone, you have
44 of them participating. So it's been happening since 2016,” said
Anderson. “Their end game is winning elections at any cost. And it's
weaponizing student data, and students have no idea that their voting
behavior is being tracked. Without proper consent, their data is used
for election strategies. They didn't sign up for any of that.”
Illinois U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Peoria, urged the U.S. Department of
Education to investigate these claims.
“Universities in Illinois and across the nation should not be sharing
student’s private data without their consent. Now it has been reported
that universities have done so to help left-leaning organizations target
and turnout students to vote for Democratic candidates,” said LaHood.
The legal filing alleges that universities participating in the ALL IN
Democracy Challenge should face the immediate termination of all federal
funding, unless they cease participation.
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Alan Wooten | The Center Square
On their website, ALL IN says it “empowers colleges and universities
to achieve excellence in nonpartisan student democratic engagement.”
Anderson said there’s a relationship between ALL IN and two other
nonprofits called: the National Study of Learning, Voting, and
Engagement at Tufts University and the National Student
Clearinghouse.
In her complaint, Anderson argued that the NSLVE organization forces
schools to share FERPA-protected data, which is then passed through
the NSC and distributed to third-party voter processing firms.
“They're taking student enrollment and cross-referencing it to voter
rolls and targeting students whether or not they need to get out and
vote,” said Anderson.
Illinois State University was named a 2024 ALL IN Most Engaged
Campus for college student voting by the ALL IN Campus Democracy
Challenge.
“Then the question is, if that student is enrolled in the fall and
they decide to transfer out of Illinois State University and attend
private college in the spring where they don't participate in this
program, how long do these NGOs sit on this data of this student?
Who has the chain of custody of the data? What happens to the data
after that?” said Anderson.
In a news release, Braiden Gonzalez, current student at Illinois
State University, said he was shocked to learn that his personal
student data was shared without his explicit consent for voter
engagement efforts.
“I trusted my university to protect my enrollment information, not
to hand it over to third-party organizations like the National
Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and the National Study of Learning,
Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE),” said Gonzalez.
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