SPRINGFIELD – The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit Thursday against the state of Illinois seeking access to its complete, unredacted voter registration database, including sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Springfield, makes Illinois at least the 19th state to be sued for such information.
Read the lawsuit: USA v Matthews complaint (PDF)
The Justice Department has been seeking that information since July, but the Illinois State Board of Elections so far has declined to hand over the information, citing both state and federal privacy laws that it says prohibit it from handing over such information.
Instead, in August, the agency gave DOJ a copy of the same database it makes available under state law to political parties and candidates. That file includes voters’ names, addresses and their age at the time they registered, but not their date of birth, driver’s license, state ID or Social Security number.
Federal officials have said they want the information to determine whether Illinois is complying with federal requirements to keep its voter database updated and accurate, which includes scrubbing registrations of voters who have died or moved away from their listed address.
State officials, however, have responded that Illinois has a decentralized voter registration system in which local election authorities at the city and county level are responsible for maintaining their own voter databases.
The lawsuit names State Board of Elections executive director Bernadette Matthews as the defendant.
A spokesman for the board said it has asked Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office for representation in the case. The agency declined to offer any further comment.
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.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
