Illinois declined to give sensitive voter data to the DOJ. Some GOP
states are doing the same
[September 23, 2025]
By Stateline and Jerry Nowicki
When the U.S. Department of Justice asked Kansas Republican Secretary of
State Scott Schwab to turn over a copy of his state’s full voter list,
including sensitive personal data, he responded with gratitude for the
Trump administration.
“We appreciate the efforts of DOJ and other federal partners to assist
in ensuring states have access to federal resources” to maintain voter
rolls, Schwab wrote in an Aug. 21 letter to the agency.
But Schwab did not provide the full data the Justice Department wanted.
Instead, the second-term state secretary of state and candidate for
governor wrote that he was “initially” giving its lawyers only publicly
available voter information.
It’s a similar response to the one given in deep blue Illinois, where
the Illinois State Elections Board, not the secretary of state, oversees
elections.
“We take Illinoisans’ privacy very seriously; data breaches and hacking
are unfortunately common, and the disclosure of sensitive information
contrary to state law would expose our residents to undue risk,” ISBE
general counsel Marni Malowitz wrote the DOJ on Sept. 2.
A spokesperson for Illinois’ elections board said Monday the state has
not heard from the DOJ since sending that letter.
As the Trump administration demands that states turn over voter data,
some Republican state officials are pushing back.
At least four states with Republican chief election officials have
offered public data but not the sensitive information — driver’s license
and partial Social Security numbers — sought by the Justice Department,
even as they take pains not to pick a fight with President Donald Trump.
Another has refused to turn over any data.
Mixed compliance
One state so far has given the federal government everything and another
appears likely to follow.
On Friday, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales, a Republican,
confirmed he provided the Justice Department with all the requested
data, making Indiana the first known state to hand over sensitive
personal information. And in South Carolina, the state Supreme Court has
cleared the way for election officials to share its data.
Many Democrats and even some Republicans fear Trump wants to use the
voter data to build a federal database of voters he can use to target
political opponents or hype rare instances of noncitizen voting.
At the same time, supporters of the effort say the Justice Department is
focused on maintaining accurate voter rolls.
For Republicans, the demands pit the traditional conservative belief in
states’ authority — and their skepticism of federal power — against the
will of a president who holds a vise-like grip over their party. They
also come after Trump spent years advancing the false claim that he won
the 2020 election.
The Justice Department, controlled by Trump allies, has contacted over
half of the states and signaled it will eventually reach out to all of
them, ensuring more GOP officials will likely confront choices over what
to give the administration. Their responses will go a long way in
determining whether the department succeeds in obtaining personal data
on tens of millions of American voters.
“It raises concerns to me about trust, about transparency, about the
potential for politicizing a process that folks on all sides of the
political spectrum need to feel comfortable and confident is being
handled appropriately,” said Matt Germer, director of the Governance
Program at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in
Washington, D.C.
Germer, who calls himself a pro-democracy conservative, said others like
him, as well as many Democrats, “have some worry that this is less about
building a case against specific incidents of fraud and more about
sowing fear in election processes.”
While Republicans have taken varied approaches to the demands,
Democratic election officials have largely spurned them. They warn Trump
is encroaching on the authority of states to run elections and are
fearful of how he may use the data. Some Democrats have pointed the
administration to publicly available data, but others have fully refused
the requests.
Illinois sent the feds the same data it makes available to political
parties and government entities. It includes the voters’ names and
addresses, their age at the time the registration was completed, and the
voting jurisdictions in which they reside. It also contains voting
history, including which elections they voted in and, in the case of
primary elections, which party’s ballot they selected.
The Justice Department on Tuesday announced it was suing the Democratic
secretaries of state in Maine and Oregon over their refusal to provide
voter data. The lawsuits mark the first legal challenges the department
has brought against states in its effort to obtain voter registration
records across the country.
At least 27 states have so far received a demand from the Justice
Department for voter data, according to the Brennan Center for Justice
at New York University, which tracks the requests. Fifteen of the states
were won by Trump.
Along with Kansas, Republican election officials in Alaska, Florida and
Utah have so far offered only public voter data. New Hampshire’s
Republican secretary of state has turned over no data, citing
restrictions in state law, and Texas officials have said they can’t
currently provide a copy of their voter rolls because of ongoing
technical upgrades.
Trump’s election efforts
Since taking office in January, Trump has tried to exert unilateral
control over elections, mostly unsuccessfully. Federal courts blocked an
executive order in March that attempted to require voters to prove their
citizenship when registering. He threatened to sign another order
purporting to ban mail-in ballots but has so far not followed through.
The Constitution gives states the authority to administer elections and
Congress the power to step in and set national election standards and
regulations. Federal legislation that would implement a
proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement passed the U.S.
House this spring, but hasn’t advanced in the Senate.
Even without a nationwide proof-of-citizenship requirement, the Trump
administration is assembling a patchwork operation to find noncitizen
voting, which is an extremely rare phenomenon. As the Trump
administration presses states for voter rolls, it confirmed last week
that the Justice Department is sharing voter data with the Department of
Homeland Security, which runs a powerful online search program that can
identify noncitizens and verify citizenship.
Several election experts question whether the Justice Department has the
authority to demand the voter data and say it’s misinterpreting federal
law. “There is zero federal law that entitles the Department of Justice
to that sensitive data,” said David Becker, executive director of the
nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
The Justice Department said in a statement to Stateline that Congress
gave the department authority under multiple federal laws to ensure
states have proper voter registration programs and procedures to keep
voter rolls free of ineligible voters. The requests for voter rolls have
been made under that authority, it said.
“States simply cannot pick and choose which federal laws they will
comply with, including our voting laws, which ensure that all American
citizens have equal access to the ballot in federal elections,”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in the news release announcing
lawsuits against Maine and Oregon.
[to top of second column]
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The Indiana Capitol sits in the heart of Indianapolis in 2024.
Indiana was the first known state to hand over sensitive personal
information as part of a 2025 request from the U.S. Department of
Justice. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)
Navigating DOJ demands
In New Hampshire, Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan has twice
refused the Justice Department. Scanlan first declined to provide the
state’s voter list in July; after the agency pressed him again, he sent
a four-paragraph letter reiterating his position.
Dhillon responded to Scanlan in a letter Aug. 18 that the department was
entitled to the voter data under federal record retention laws. She
wrote that the agency needed the data to determine whether New Hampshire
is complying with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 federal law that
revamped election administration in the wake of the disputed 2000
presidential election.
Scanlan has said New Hampshire law is clear in only permitting the
secretary of state to release voter lists, without sensitive personal
information, in limited circumstances. Political parties, political
committees and candidates may request the list; other outside
organizations and agencies, like the Justice Department, cannot.
Scanlan, first elected in 2022, has avoided politically charged rhetoric
during the dispute over the voter list. He will be up for reelection
next year, but not before voters. In New Hampshire, the
Republican-controlled legislature elects the secretary of state every
two years.
In an interview with Stateline, Scanlan said he’s approached the
situation in a “matter of fact” manner.
“I know other states may have different statutes that allow them to
provide that information and beyond that, I really don’t have strong
feelings about where this goes,” Scanlan said.
“I’m just going to administer the New Hampshire statutes, taking into
consideration what may apply at the federal level through statute or
through the courts,” he said. “But for the time being, I think our
position is pretty clear.”
Schwab, the Kansas Republican secretary of state, will face voters next
year — but as a candidate for governor. A former state lawmaker first
elected secretary of state in 2018, he is running in a large Republican
primary field where candidates, including him, are competing to link
themselves to Trump.
But Schwab has also long taken a clear stance against election denialism
and knocked down false claims about Kansas elections. In 2022 he won a
primary election, 55%-45%, that pitted him against a Republican activist
who promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
As the Justice Department push for voter rolls moves forward, Schwab has
attempted to find a middle ground. He provided only Kansas’s public
voter data, but held open the possibility of turning over more. And in
his August letter to the department, he praised the Trump
administration’s priorities on election security.
“We agree that routine voter maintenance is critical to ensuring
accurate voter rolls and confidence in elections,” Schwab wrote.
Schwab declined Stateline’s interview request. In response to questions,
John Milburn, a spokesperson for the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office,
wrote in an email: “We remain in conversation with the DOJ and have no
further information or comment at this time.”
Trey Grayson, a former Republican Kentucky secretary of state in the
2000s, said if he was in office, he could see potentially providing
publicly available voter data to the Justice Department. The department
is an entity “you have to take seriously,” Grayson said, though he added
he wished it would disclose more about how it plans to use the
information.
There’s also politics.
“President Trump today in 2025 is more popular, more influential, more
powerful within the Republican Party than he was in 2017,” said Grayson,
who sits on the board of the Center for Election Innovation & Research,
a nonprofit organization that works to build confidence in elections.
Indiana, South Carolina support data sharing
Morales, the Indiana Republican secretary of state, invoked Trump when
he announced last week he had shared full voter data, including driver’s
license and partial Social Security numbers, with the Justice
Department.
“If providing the Justice Department information can help Indiana with
ensuring our voter list is accurate and up to date, we will do so. We
will take all the help we can get. I am proud to work with President
Trump and his administration to strengthen election integrity,” Morales
said at a news conference on Friday.
A former aide to Mike Pence while he was governor of Indiana, Morales
was elected in 2022 after calling the 2020 election a “scam” and writing
the “outcome is questionable.”
Morales made the disclosure about the voter list in response to
reporters’ questions, but he had called the news conference to highlight
an alleged case of noncitizen voting by a man with a Mexican passport
who had voted six times since 2018. He didn’t identify the man, and
criminal charges don’t appear to have been filed.
The decision to turn over the data disappointed Julia Vaughn, executive
director of Common Cause Indiana, a voting rights group. She said her
organization is prepared to challenge in court any unlawful sharing of
the voter list for illegal purposes.
“We’re concerned about his willingness to allow the federal government
to interfere in the administration of Indiana elections,” Vaughn said.
In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster went to court,
fighting to allow officials to share the full voter list with the
Justice Department. After the South Carolina State Election Commission
received a request for the voter list in August, a registered voter sued
to block its release.
Last week, the South Carolina Supreme Court, in a decision on procedural
grounds, cleared the way for the state to hand over the data while the
lawsuit plays out in court.
Speaking with reporters earlier this month, McMaster cast the sensitive
data as already in the possession of the government and pointed out that
the federal government created Social Security.
McMaster noted the South Carolina Constitution contains a right to
privacy, but said the Justice Department’s request wasn’t an illegal
overreach. “The federal government does have the authority to ask for
these things,” he said.
But as the Trump administration seeks voter lists, Germer, of the R
Street Institute, voiced concern about what the demands could mean for
the future. The collection effort is beginning to set a precedent and a
mechanism for future data grabs, he cautioned.
“It’s important to remember that these kinds of actions don’t occur in a
vacuum,” Germer said, adding that “we live in a world where one
president takes action and the next president builds upon it.”
The Indiana Capital Chronicle’s Whitney Downard
contributed reporting. Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be
reached at jshorman@stateline.org.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published
in Stateline.org.
Capitol News Illinois Editor Jerry Nowicki contributed the
information regarding Illinois’ resistance to the DOJ’s demands.
Stateline is part of States
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questions: info@stateline.org. |
