“The Department of Justice is relying on faulty databases and attempting to find non-citizen voters and other voters who might be ineligible,” an ACLU attorney said. “And we also know that the Division of Elections has been undertaking non-routine measures in activating voters based on known faulty citizenship information and outside of their authority granted in the Alaska statutes.”
Alaska has asked a state court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the Division of Elections of violating residents’ right to privacy by sharing confidential voter information with the Trump administration.
According to Alaska Public Media, the state agreed to turn over its voter lists—including drivers license numbers and personal addresses—following a series of demands from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Justice Department has filed similar lawsuits against dozens of states, few of which passed legal muster. In most cases, the only favorable verdicts secure by the Trump administration have come from Republican-controlled states that were already amenable to the president’s requests.
In Alaska, the League of Women Voters and the state’s Black Caucus took action in April, filing a lawsuit against Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, the latter of whom oversees state-level elections in her capacity as lieutenant governor.
During oral arguments in Alaska Superior Court, state attorney Margaret Paton-Walsh said that the plaintiff organizations claim that the Justice Department intends to use collected voter registration information for broadly unlawful purposes. But, Paton-Walsh said, this is a purely hypothetical harm, with it currently being impossible for anyone to know the Trump administration’s exact intent.
“Without that critical factual development, this court can only guess whether the division’s conduct will present any legal problems, much less meet the specific elements of the claims alleged by the plaintiffs here,” Paton-Walsh said in a Wednesday hearing. “To decide these claims now, you will have to engage in the writing of fiction.”
Paton-Walsh also said that any information shared by the state does not constitute “sensitive” data, which is defined by state law as any details which, if disclosed, “could cause embarrassment or anxiety, or could cause humiliation, harassment, or economic or physical reprisals.”
“Your name, your date of birth, your residence address, your driver’s license number, the last four of your Social [Security Number’,” Paton-Walsh said. “I don’t think any… I mean, where is the embarrassment or humiliation?”
In response, ACLU attorney Cindy Woods, representing the plaintiffs, said that federal and state databases have already misidentified legal voters as ineligible.
“The Department of Justice is relying on faulty databases and attempting to find non-citizen voters and other voters who might be ineligible,” she said. “And we also know that the Division of Elections has been undertaking non-routine measures in activating voters based on known faulty citizenship information and outside of their authority granted in the Alaska statutes.”
These acts, Woods said, all but ensure that any information requisitioned and retained by the federal government becomes sensitive.
“These are all key components of identity theft,” Woods said of the types of data collected, “and putting those in the hands of a government that has mishandled sensitive information would cause anxiety to any rational actor.”
Alaska Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman, who is overseeing the lawsuit, said that he will issue a decision on whether to dismiss the lawsuit sometime in the near future.
Sources
Alaska Lt. Gov. faces lawsuit for sharing confidential voter data with Trump DOJ
League of Women Voters of Alaska et al. v. Dahlstrom et al.
State asks judge to dismiss lawsuit over sharing voter information with Justice Department
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