Minnesota, other states are rejecting the Trump administration’s requests for private voter information
The shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by US government officials have increased the scrutiny of immigrants on the streets of Minneapolis, but it was in a local court on Monday that a federal judge raised a skeptical eye about the Trump administration’s crackdown on the government.
Judge Katherine Menendez questioned the government’s motivation for the immigration ban, pointing to a letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Saturday to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. The letter laid out conditions for reducing deportations in Minnesota, including demands that the state give the federal government access to voter rolls, change the state’s Medicaid and food assistance records and repeal sanctuary city policies.
“I mean, isn’t there a limit to what the executive branch can do under the guise of enforcing immigration law?” Mendez asked.
Although Minnesota feels burdened by the federal government like other states – both Walz and the Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey are the victims of a vague investigation by the Department of Justice – the issue of voters across the country is a problem for the administration of the second American President Donald Trump.
State election officials, federal policy organizations and federal judges have raised concerns that Trump administration officials are trying to use sensitive data to search for potential citizens on the rolls, and that could scare off a visible minority of US citizens from exercising their right to vote during an election year.
“If that information is out of control, it can be misused, given to extremists, or weaponized for political gain,” government watchdog Common Cause said in a statement.
Bondi’s letter raises concerns
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 44 states have received requests from the federal government for complete voter registration lists. The liberal think-tank says 11 states, led mostly by Republican officials such as Texas and Arkansas, are in the process of providing lists that include driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, going beyond the information contained in publicly available voter rolls.
But other states, mostly led by Democratic officials, have pushed back on the requests, leading to more court battles. The Justice Department has sued more than 20 states, as well as the District of Columbia, in its quest for information.
Election administration in the US is generally decentralized, although Congress in DC can pass laws that affect the entire country. The Justice Department says it needs access to detailed voter information to ensure election officials are following federal election laws.
“Our election laws ensure that all American citizens can vote freely and fairly,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement last month.
“States that continue to flout voting laws undermine our mission to ensure that Americans have an accurate voter list when they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters trust the results of the election.”
The Minnesota judge was not alone in criticizing Bondi’s letter to Walz.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes – who told the federal government earlier this month that he had “set the sand” in response to a request for detailed voter information from that southwestern state – slammed the letter to Minnesota, likening it to a crackdown on organized crime.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in a social media post late Tuesday expressed concern that the Trump administration is using immigration law “as a voter suppression tool.”
In Oregon, a federal judge scheduled an additional hearing Monday in the ongoing case over Bondi’s letter. A judge has dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to keep Oregon’s voter rolls intact, though the Trump administration plans to appeal.
As It Happened6:43Minnesota’s secretary of state says she won’t hand over voter information to the Trump administration
US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz outlining what it would take to “end the chaos in Minnesota,” including giving the US Department of Justice access to Minnesota voter rolls. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal that he has no intention of letting that happen.
A series of obstacles
The federal rollback in Oregon followed similar decisions last week in Georgia and California. Georgia was different because it was the Republican leadership, not the Democratic Alliance, that opposed the Justice Department’s request. It was a continuation of the backlash that most Americans saw in Trump’s now-famous phone call made public after the 2020 election, in which he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “get” him votes.
Meanwhile, federal Judge David O. Carter in the California case said the request was illegal, including an “unprecedented amount of confidential voter information,” which would have put the information of the state’s 23 million citizens at risk.
“The takeover of democracy does not happen all at once; it is gradually removed until it is gone,” Carter wrote.
The Democracy Docket, a site led by voting rights lawyer Marc Elias — who has long been scorned by Trump since working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — warned of the collection of personal data “under the leadership of the Justice Department that has borne out Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.”
To Elias’ point, Bondi made unsubstantiated claims about Pennsylvania’s election management after the 2020 election about Pennsylvania and he and FBI Director Kash Patel – who has also spread voter fraud theories without evidence – refused to say during their confirmation programs whether they thought Joe Biden won that vote correctly.
Trump’s persistent accusations of voter fraud that helped Biden win have been rejected by the courts but helped rally a crowd of supporters who rebelled at the US Capitol. One study that analyzed hundreds of audits in more than half of the states in the 2020 election concluded that “the net amount of error in counting presidential votes was in the thousands of percent, with similar unsubstantiated errors in other state and federal contests.”
The Associated Press found 475 cases of voter fraud in 2020 in the six contiguous states it studied, often involving voter fraudsters and others sending in deceased ballots.
Challenges in non-citizen narratives
In 2016, Trump even protested, in fact, the extent of his electoral victory. Insisting that Clinton’s popular election of more than 2.8 million votes was motivated by non-citizens voting for the Democrat, Trump established a federal commission that was disbanded without significant production on those claims.
“Claiming that there’s a lot of voter fraud, and saying that they’re not citizens, is a way to bring together two Republican boogeymen … to bring together two issues that are completely unsupported by the facts,” election law expert Rick Hasen said Tuesday on Contrarian, a Substack site that donates its profits against Trump’s ongoing court cases.
President Donald Trump wants to end mail-in voting, saying it’s the cause of ‘massive voter fraud’ in the US Andrew Chang examines what might be behind Trump’s aversion to mail-in voting and what he can actually do about it. Photos provided by Getty Images, The Canadian Press and Reuters.
The CATO Institute, founded by regular Republican donor Charles Koch, has disputed some allegations about non-citizen voting favored by MAGA organizations supporting Trump, while pointing to the small number of votes in many local elections where they are allowed to vote.
“Ironically, non-citizens in America show very little tendency to register or vote even in the few progressive areas that have given them the opportunity to run for local office, such as city council and school board,” the libertarian think-tank said.
Knowingly committing voter fraud can lead to prison terms, making it a dangerous proposition for unauthorized US citizens even before the deportation efforts of a large number of Trump’s second administration.
Trump has already turned the tide of the midterms, convincing a handful of Republican-led states to redraw House districts in an effort to win. Trump is hoping to avoid a repeat of his first term as president, in which Republicans dropped 42 seats and lost control of the House in the 2018 midterms.
Democrats in other states have also fought their redistricting, but legal challenges are ongoing and will need to be ruled out soon. Party primaries in other states begin in March, with midterm elections in Nov. 3.
