Nebraska voter is plaintiff in federal lawsuit challenging release of sensitive voter data to DOJ

A Nebraska voter is a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday challenging the Department of Justice’s demands for and consolidation of state voter registration files.

The case against the DOJ and Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche claims the voter information obtained from states is being consolidated to create “a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus.” It asks a federal court to find unlawful the DOJ’s decision to seek and consolidate the data in a central federal database, and prohibit the agency from sharing the data it has obtained from states like Nebraska.

The lawsuit was brought by Common Cause, a national advocacy organization with state chapters across the country, and four voters who had their information turned over to the DOJ by state officials. Three of the voters are from Texas. Linda Duckworth, the other voter plaintiff, is from Nebraska. Common Cause and the voters are represented by attorneys from the ACLU, the Protect Democracy Project and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Last year, the DOJ sent letters to secretaries of state across the country requesting a complete statewide voter registration list to “assess compliance” with federal law. That includes names, addresses, dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. In some cases, it includes a person’s state driver’s license number.

Nebraska is one of at least 14 states to acquiesce to DOJ’s demands. Thirty states have refused the DOJ’s requests and faced lawsuits as a result. In court filings, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen said the decision to share the file was made, in part, to spare the state “costly” litigation.

Sara Chimene-Weiss, an attorney with the Protect Democracy Project, said the consolidation of voters’ personal information makes the data “extremely vulnerable” to bad actors, like hackers, and misuse by the federal government.

“We have specific laws in place that were passed in the wake of Watergate to put guardrails up to prevent exactly this type of mass data collection and surveillance of American citizens, and this administration is just completely obliterating and ignoring those important guardrails,” she said.

The lawsuit also alleges that the DOJ intends to share the collected voter data with the Department of Homeland Security. DHS runs an online service called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to “verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship of applicants seeking benefits or licenses.” But according to the lawsuit, DOJ is using this system to input voter data and conduct “mass citizenship checks” despite high error rates and unreliable data.

“[SAVE] was created for the very limited purpose of checking eligibility for certain benefits, and the current administration has tried to rapidly repurpose it as a way to check citizenship status and label people as non-citizens,” Chimene-Weiss said. “There's certain categories of individuals that it is more likely to falsely mark as non-citizens. This includes people who have citizenship by derivation or acquisition, or have been naturalized.”

One of the voter plaintiffs, Anthony Nel of Texas, is a native of South Africa who became a citizen as a teenager after his parents were naturalized. According to the lawsuit, the SAVE system flagged Nel as a non-citizen, which led to his removal from his county’s list of registered voters. He had to renew his passport to prove his citizenship and be re-registered to vote, according to the lawsuit.

Attorneys for Common Cause and the voters claim that the DOJ’s actions violate the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing many actions taken by federal agencies, because they exceeded the agency’s authority and violated the constitution and various federal privacy laws. They are asking the court to “stop the Department of Justice from holding this data, from using this data and from sharing this data,” Chimene-Weiss said.

Though Nebraska voters’ information has already been turned over, a state lawsuit challenging Evnen’s authority to release such information is pending in front of the Nebraska Supreme Court.