Labor, voting rights groups intervene in Illinois voter data lawsuit
[January 14, 2026]
By Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD – Organized labor organizations and voting rights groups in
Illinois are seeking to intervene as codefendants in a federal lawsuit
in which the Trump administration is seeking access to the state’s
complete, unredacted voter registration database, including sensitive
personal information about individual voters.
In motions filed in federal court in Springfield Thursday, Jan. 9,
lawyers representing Common Cause Illinois, the Illinois Coalition for
Immigrant and Refugee Rights and three individual voters joined the
American Civil Liberties Union’s National Voting Rights Project, ACLU of
Illinois and the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in seeking
to intervene in the case in hopes of blocking the administration from
accessing the data.
“The Trump Department of Justice — without proper authorization from
Congress — is apparently seeking to create a nationwide database that
can be used to harass voters and fuel false claims of voter fraud,” ACLU
of Illinois’ Kevin Fee said in a statement Monday. “It is critical that
states — including Illinois — resist this illegal effort and protect the
privacy of our voters.”
Earlier, Illinois AFL-CIO, the Illinois Alliance for Retired Americans
and the Illinois Federation of Teachers filed a similar motion to
intervene.
They argued in their motion that they each devote significant resources
to registering their members to vote, and they fear the lawsuit could
result in a ruling that undermines those efforts.
“DOJ’s actions here threaten to chill its members and constituents from
registering to vote, expose them to unlawful purges, and put their
private information at risk,” IFT said in the motion.
National push for voter data
Illinois is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C., that are being sued
by the Trump administration for access to their unredacted voter rolls.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed the Illinois case Dec. 18 following
months of efforts to obtain the information directly from the Illinois
State Board of Elections.
DOJ has said it wants access to “all fields” in the database, including
each voter’s complete name, street address, date of birth, and either
their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social
Security number.
In August, the state board gave DOJ a partially redacted registration
list — the same list it makes available to political parties and
campaigns — which does not include complete street addresses, dates of
birth, driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers. The board
said both state and federal privacy laws preclude it from releasing the
unredacted database.
According to a tracking tool maintained by the Brennan Center for
Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute at the New York
University School of Law, DOJ has requested unredacted voter data from
at least 43 states and Washington, D.C. Most, like Illinois, have
provided partially redacted lists or have provided no data at all.
Eight states — Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming — have reportedly handed over their
unredacted lists or indicated that they will.
Maintaining accurate voter rolls
In their correspondence with Illinois officials and documents filed in
court, DOJ officials have suggested they need the unredacted lists to
enforce provisions of federal laws that require states to properly
maintain accurate and up-to-date voter rolls.
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A voting booth is pictured in Sangamon County. (Capitol News
Illinois photo by Andrew Campbell)
Federal officials specifically cite provisions of the 1993 National
Voter Registration Act, also known as the “motor voter” law that require
states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to
remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of
eligible voters,” either because the voter has died or moved to a
different address.
But legal experts, including two attorneys who formerly worked in the
Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, argue DOJ has only
limited legal authority when it comes to enforcing NVRA, and no legal
authority to access sensitive personal data about individual voters.
“There is just no legal basis for the DOJ to seek sensitive voter data,”
David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now runs the Center for Election
Innovation and Research, said during a media call with reporters Jan. 6.
“The DOJ’s jurisdiction is limited to that which Congress specifically
authorized, and Congress has never authorized the collection of
sensitive voter data that is protected by state law.”
Eileen O’Connor, another former DOJ attorney who is now a senior counsel
and manager in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program,
also said DOJ has only limited authority to enforce NVRA’s list
maintenance requirements.
“How that works is, if a state doesn’t have a program in place that
complies with the National Voter Registration Act in terms of regularly
removing voters who have moved or otherwise become ineligible, the
department can bring an enforcement action,” she said in an interview
with Capitol News Illinois. “They don’t get to do the list maintenance.
They don’t get to take the voter file and run it against some other
databases and say, ‘Here’s who you have to remove.’”
Dangers of data release
Becker and O’Connor both said the release of unredacted voter
registration data to DOJ would constitute a significant breach of
privacy for millions of Americans and could put their personal data at
risk of being hacked.
Becker described the information DOJ is seeking — Social Security
numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth — as “the holy
trinity of identity theft,” while O’Connor described it as “a hacker’s
dream.”
But O’Connor also said she believes the Trump administration’s real goal
is not just to enforce NVRA’s list maintenance requirements but to take
over that process so DOJ can determine who is eligible to vote
nationwide.
“I think this is part of an attempted federal takeover, federal
incursion into the running of our elections,” she said.
“They’re going to take these voter rolls, do a bunch of matches to
databases — we don’t know what databases; don’t know how accurate they
are, how up-to-date they are — and send lists back to the states and
tell them, ‘You have to remove these voters.’”
The case is pending in U.S. District Court in the Central District of
Illinois.
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. |
