23 States stopped Trump from Rigging the Midterms for GOP

The letters arrived first. Then the phrase that made election officials sit up: they were “currently under investigation.”

Last week the Justice Department asked officials in about 30 states and the District of Columbia for election records.

What Washington demanded

The Justice Department did not ask for the public voter files most states already sell or post. It wanted the full internal lists: names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.Officials said they needed the data to check whether rolls were clean, especially for noncitizens.

President Trump has claimed for years that millions of noncitizens are registered or have voted. Multiple studies and the thin trail of actual prosecutions have found the practice is rare.

STATES SAID NO

States that refused — a mix of Democratic and Republican ones, including Kentucky, Idaho, West Virginia, and Georgia — argued the request collided with state privacy laws and that Congress never gave the federal government a blank check to vacuum up every registered voter’s personal identifiers. Judges, including some appointed by Trump, kept agreeing. They said the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and other statutes the department cited do not turn statewide voter files into federal property on demand.

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