ACLU sues feds for collecting voters’ information from Wyoming, other states

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, saying the federal agency broke the law with its efforts to amass a large centralized voter registry containing sensitive information. The ACLU and other counsel sued on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based voter rights group Common Cause, and four individuals who say the Trump administration’s massive voter data collection effort has harmed them.

The complaint takes a passing jab at Wyoming and 11 other states that have handed sensitive voter information to the DOJ. “These states have disregarded the privacy and voting rights of millions of Americans who never consented to disclosing their sensitive personal data to the federal government for undefined purposes and without statutory authorization,” says the complaint.

Wyoming was among the first states to grant the federal agency’s request — a move that led to a Cheyenne-based attorney filing an official complaint for criminal action against Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray. Gray has said repeatedly that he worked in “close consultation” with the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office and complied with a lawful request.

Gray reiterated his stance Tuesday. “This lawsuit shows that left-wing states and their political allies, such as far left groups Common Cause and the ACLU, are panicking after recent reports show that the Department of Justice’s review is finding hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on states’ voter rolls,” wrote Gray in an email to Cowboy State Daily. “The Democrat states continuing to resist are doing so in direct violation of federal law.”

Gray asserted that 17 other states, including Wyoming, “have followed the law” by handing over the data. In the ACLU’s complaint, the DOJ’s latest figure reflects 19 states acquiescing to its demands.

The ACLU’s complaint points to case law saying the U.S. Constitution provides that only states, not Congress — “and certainly not the President” — may decide who is qualified to vote in federal elections. The National Voting Rights Act aims to promote voting access and prevent discriminatory laws, says the complaint. “But nowhere does the NVRA, or any federal law, contemplate a federal takeover of the States’ voter registration processes,” it adds.

The ACLU asserts that the DOJ did not follow the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which aims to prevent the government from secretly creating centralized federal information systems. “Congress established robust safeguards against such ‘interagency computer data banks’ to make it ‘legally impossible for the Federal Government in the future to put together anything resembling a ‘1984’ personal dossier on a citizen,” the complaint says, quoting from the privacy act’s legislative history.

In a similar vein, the complaint points to the Paperwork Reduction Act, which lists steps agencies must take before collecting information: evaluate the need, describe the information sought, develop a collection plan, and alert the public for comment beforehand. The complaint alleges that the federal government is building a centralized voter database of unprecedented scope, at least in part to purge purportedly unlawful voters via ill-fitting investigative tools. The case is ongoing.