Illinois elections board refuses to give DOJ sensitive voter data
[September 04, 2025]
By Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois State Board of Elections said this week it
will not hand over to the Trump administration a copy of the state’s
complete, unredacted voter registration database, citing state laws that
require the agency to protect voters’ sensitive personal information.
In a letter Tuesday to the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Civil Rights Division, ISBE general counsel Marni Malowitz
said releasing the data would expose Illinois voters to unnecessary
risks.
Illinois is reportedly one of several states that DOJ has asked to turn
over entire voter registration databases, including sensitive personal
information such as dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID
numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.
DOJ has said it wants the information in order to enforce federal
requirements that states maintain accurate and up-to-date voter
registration lists. But state elections officials have said they are
precluded under state law from releasing sensitive information contained
in the registration files.
In August, state officials sent DOJ a copy of the same type of data file
it shares with political committees and other government agencies. That
file includes voters’ names, addresses and their age at the time they
registered, but not their date of birth, driver’s license, state ID or
Social Security number.
But DOJ wrote back on Aug. 14 saying that was not good enough. It
demanded the state turn over its entire database, with “all fields,
including the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential
address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four
digits of the registrant’s social security number as required under the
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to register individuals for federal
elections.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the elections board had not indicated whether
it had received a response from the Justice Department to its latest
letter.
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DOJ has said it wants the information to determine whether Illinois is
complying with requirements under the 1993 National Voter Registration
Act and the 2003 Help America Vote Act to keep the voter registration
lists accurate and up to date. That includes occasionally purging from
the voter rolls the names of people who have died or moved.
But DOJ has also asked Illinois to identify the number of registered
voters who have been removed from the rolls for other reasons, such as
not being U.S. citizens, being adjudicated incompetent, or for felony
convictions.
David Becker, a former DOJ attorney in the voting section of the Civil
Rights Division who now directs the nonpartisan Center for Election
Innovation and Research, said during a media briefing Wednesday that the
federal agency has only limited authority to enforce the list
maintenance requirements of those laws.
He also said the department has no legal authority to demand voters’
sensitive personal information and it would have little use for the
information even if it could have access to it.
“The DOJ could not possibly, even if they had it, conduct better list
maintenance than the states are currently doing,” he said. “The most
valuable asset that (states) have is their DMV database, which the
federal government does not have access to. So even if they had a legal
authority to gain this data, it wouldn’t do them any good, and they
don’t have the legal authority to get this data.”
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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