Daily Herald opinion: Too much to ask: Illinois officials, please keep our voter data private

There is no federal law to compel it, but the Trump administration has asked election officials from at least 18 states, including Illinois, to turn over sensitive voter registration information. Not all the requests are exactly the same; in Illinois they want a copy of the state’s voter registration database — a voluminous file that contains, among other things, voters’ dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers — and details about how election officials are working to take ineligible voters off the rolls.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has also requested a list of all Illinois election officials whose job it was to keep the state’s voter rolls up to date during the two years leading up to the November 2024 elections.

What exactly the feds want with this information has not been clearly stated, but President Donald Trump has hammered relentlessly for years on his assertion that noncitizen voting is rampant in this country, even though there is no proof — and in fact, available data indicates that voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare.

Ultimately, we believe the underlying premise of these DOJ actions and President Trump’s executive order in March, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” is to convince Americans that our elections can’t be trusted.

Of the 18 states reportedly hit up by the DOJ so far — Illinois, Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah and Wisconsin — Florida and Oklahoma already make voter lists open to the public. Most of the other states have said they are studying the request.

Illinois officials have made no public comment so far. We urge them to keep Illinoisans’ sensitive voter data private to the best of their ability. Local election officials throughout the state have an important bond with voters, which is critical to voters’ ultimate trust in the system. What the Trump administration is asking has strong political overtones; indeed, we can think of several reasons why the administration might want access to Illinois voter data, none of them likely to improve our voting processes.

Giving us hope is David Becker, the leader of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (and also a former attorney in the DOJ’s voting section), who said the DOJ is engaging in overreach and has no authority to request sensitive information on individual voters. “They know this,” he said of the DOJ. “Yet they continue to seek to receive this information, citing sections of federal law that don’t apply.”

According to the DOJ’s letter to Illinois requesting the data, the report Illinois filed for the two-year period leading up to the 2024 election suggested several counties were doing a poor job of maintaining their local voter rolls. In Illinois, voter registration lists are not maintained by the state, but by local election authorities, mostly the 102 county clerks but also some specialized election authorities as in Chicago and Aurora.

The letter also asks for the number of voters identified as ineligible to vote since November 2022 either because they were noncitizens, were adjudicated as incompetent or had felony convictions.

Becker points out there is no federal law that requires states to go through their lists to find noncitizens. He adds, importantly, there is no evidence that there are significant numbers of noncitizens on Illinois’ or any other state’s voter lists.

If, in fact, there are out of date registration lists in some counties or election authorities, pressure should be brought to bear to update those. But that can happen in-state. We fail to see how the Trump administration could do a better job than our local authorities.