If you’re already frightened that all blue states will soon be invaded by the Department of Homeland Security and other nefarious federal forces, then you may want to stop reading … now. Or take a sedative. Because despite getting minimal news coverage, the information incursion that is underway via the Trump administration is especially terrifying.
In July, the US Department of Justice asked Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin to produce files with the full names, birth dates, license IDs, and Social Security Numbers of all voters. After Galvin failed to respond, the DOJ sued the secretary to compel his office to hand over the data. And then some allies showed up to bolster the defense.
The intervenors: A uniquely blue shield
With an escalating threat of hostile feds gaining access to voter info, in December the ACLU of Massachusetts (along with the ACLU National Voting Rights Project) filed a motion to intervene in the case on behalf of the nonprofits Jane Doe Inc. and Common Cause. The unified ACLU front is also representing an individual, Juan Pablo Jaramillo, whose “status as a naturalized citizen may place him at a heightened risk of being targeted for voter disenfranchisement, a threat that extends to countless other Massachusetts voters.”
According to the ACLU, “DOJ’s lawsuit appears to be connected to governmental efforts to create a national voter database without congressional authorization, and to question the validity of certain states’ election administration process and voter rolls, and the status of certain voters.”
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no business accessing Bay Staters’ sensitive personal information,” Geoff Foster, Common Cause’s Massachusetts executive director said in a statement. “Handing this data over to the federal government violates the law and would put voters’ private information in the hands of dangerous election conspiracy peddlers.”
The New England State Area Conference of the NAACP and Massachusetts Alliance for Retired Americans also filed a motion to intervene as defendants. Their memorandum reads in part: “This assault intrudes not only on Massachusetts’ constitutional prerogative to maintain and protect its own voter registration list but also on the privacy of individual Massachusetts voters who have good reason to fear their personal information being handed over to the federal government.”
Judge Leo T. Sorokin is currently weighing the intervention requests in the US District Court for Massachusetts. With or without co-defendants, Secretary Galvin and Attorney General Andrea Campbell are also expected to respond to the US attorney’s motion to compel. In the meantime, they’re playing hardball and slowing the game down.
National incursion: 23 states and counting
It’s not just the Bay State that is being muscled. According to Democracy Docket, “the DOJ has intensified its demands for voter information as part of a broader, politically charged push aimed at pressuring states to remove voters from the rolls and advancing the Trump administration’s unfounded claims of widespread illegal voting.”
So far, the department has sued 23 states total (including Mass), plus Washington, DC—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Georgia, Illinois, Washington, and Wisconsin. All voted against Trump in 2020. All have also refused to hand over unredacted voter files.
These are dark developments in any light. Electorally, members of the Trump administration and their allies in several states have made no secret of their intent to scrub as much blue from the map as possible. Having unfettered access to info on voters in a liberal stronghold like Mass could be useful to those ends.
Even scarier, though, are other ways a hostile leadership in DC could weaponize personal info on regions or even individuals it dislikes. With ICE gangs roving streets in Illinois and Minnesota knocking doors and pulling guns and kidnapping civilians, it’s easy to envision how a data dump like that requested by the DOJ of Mass can lead to Gilead. And that’s all in addition to the danger posed by the government’s inability to protect sensitive materials …
Since Trump took office for his second term last year, a chorus of compelling whistleblowers has emerged to sing about vulnerable data. The famously slapstick Department of Government Efficiency reportedly exposed personal deets on hundreds of millions of people, while international hackers have had outright outflow field days.
To further the security point, this administration can’t even shield the home addresses and identities of its violent masked immigrant herders from doxxing. Why should we expect they will do better for Americans in blue hubs that Trump openly derides? Democratic leaders have had their share of compromised troves too, but they’re not the ones attempting to triangulate their friends and foes in an unprecedented fashion while dispatching jackboots to terrorize innocents.
Right out in the open
At the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, we often investigate clandestine and covert (often illegal, unconstitutional, etc.) ways that local, state, and federal government agencies alike gather your coordinates, details, and secrets—whether through Automated License Plate Readers or cell-site simulators, the latter a sophisticated surveillance unit which collects phone data and identifies users. It’s markedly less common for the commonwealth, which we fight on countless transparency-related fronts in any given year, to be defending Mass residents on the right side of a natsec issue against a federal government that we trust even less.
But that’s where we are. The horror show outlined above considered, I can’t tell if it’s reassuring or a sign of end times that the threat posed by the DOJ v. Galvin case and pressure from the madmen and women in Washington is serious enough to spur civil liberties watchdogs to side with the state that they frequent file lawsuits against. Perhaps it’s both.
“Federal overreach of this kind threatens voters’ privacy and their fundamental right to participate in our democracy,” Ari Savitzky, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “The Department of Justice is using the civil rights statutes as pretext to try to hoover up private voter data and use it for improper ends. Voters’ rights are at stake, and their voices must be heard.”
