President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice sued the executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections on Thursday, alleging the board’s refusal to release sensitive information on the state’s roughly 8.3 million registered voters violated federal civil rights law.
The 10-page lawsuit, filed in federal court in Springfield, seeks a judge’s order instructing state election officials to release to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi “the current electronic copy of Illinois computerized statewide voter registration list, with all fields, including each registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, and either their state driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number” or other unique identifier.
The complaint, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, argues the federal Civil Rights Act gives Bondi “the sweeping power to obtain these records,” which the Justice Department has said it needs as part of an investigation into the state’s compliance with federal elections laws.
State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich declined to comment on the pending litigation, which makes Illinois one of the latest states to face a lawsuit from the Justice Department over the release of full voter rolls. The Illinois lawsuit was filed on the same day the Justice Department filed a similar complaint in federal court in Madison against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, as well as in Georgia and Washington, D.C., bringing the Justice Department’s nationwide total to 22 such lawsuits, the department said.
Critics have raised red flags about the Trump administration seeking access to sensitive voter data, noting Trump has repeated false claims that the 2020 presidential election he lost was stolen and that the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol was merely a protest of “patriots.”
The dispute between the Illinois elections board and the Trump Justice Department began this summer, when the Civil Rights Division requested the voter data and a laundry list of other information on Illinois elections and voters.
The push for disclosure of Illinois voters’ sensitive personal information was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to exert federal authority over state-run elections, including shifting the Civil Rights Division’s focus from ensuring access to the polls to combating the specter of voter fraud. The Justice Department has sought similar records from 40 states since May, including neighboring Wisconsin, Indiana and Missouri, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The DOJ has not sued in Indiana or Missouri.
The Justice Department earlier this month also filed lawsuits similar to the one in Illinois against Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state.
After a series of letters between federal and state officials, the Illinois elections board, which had already turned over a copy of the same voter registration list state law makes available to registered political committees and government entities, told the Trump administration just after Labor Day that it would not comply with the request for more sensitive data.
An attorney for the bipartisan elections board wrote that it “has a duty to abide by all state and federal laws governing the protection of sensitive personal information” and that the Trump administration failed to provide adequate legal justifications for its request.
“While (the board) respects and shares the department’s commitment to assessing Illinois’ compliance with the (National Voter Registration Act), we remain concerned about the scope of and authority for the department’s request, given that the NVRA permits redaction of sensitive personal information,” Marni Malowitz, the board’s general counsel, wrote Sept. 2 in a four-page letter to top officials in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “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.”
The board’s letter cited several provisions of state and federal law that it argued would prohibit the release of such information in the manner the Justice Department requested.
In its lawsuit Thursday, which names State Board of Elections Executive Director Bernadette Matthews as the defendant, the Justice Department asks the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois to find Matthews violated the Civil Rights Act by refusing the request from the U.S. attorney general. The Justice Department also argues that, under the law, the court can only decide whether or not the election officials complied with the demand, not the validity for the demand itself.
In a longer filing supporting its motion to compel the state to produce unredacted voter rolls, the Justice Department argues that the board’s reliance on state law in refusing to release the voter data was “without merit and insufficient.”
“Officers of election have no discretion to refuse or otherwise limit the federal election records or papers or the content of those records made available to the Attorney General,” the Justice Department filing argues.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless, whom President Joe Biden appointed to the bench in 2023. The state’s response to the Justice Department’s motion to compel release of the voter records is due Jan. 2.
