Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson declined to fully comply with the Justice Department’s request for certain information related to the state’s voter rolls, arguing that she sees no legal justification for handing over “the personal identifying information of 2.1 million Utah voters.”
In July, DOJ officials sent Henderson a letter containing an expansive list of requests for voter information, such as Utah’s full computerized statewide voter registration list containing all fields of data in the list, including sensitive or private information like Social Security numbers and birthdates not released to the public. The Justice Department also requested statistical data on the number of voters removed from the rolls for specific reasons, such as inactivity, being non‑citizens, felony convictions, or other causes.
Henderson, a Republican, responded to the request in a letter Thursday that complied with parts of the DOJ’s demands, such as information related to voters removed from the rolls.
However, she brushed aside the government’s sweeping request for the full voter-registration database that included private fields, choosing instead to send the DOJ voter registration lists that are already available to the public.
“If they want protected data, there’s a process for government entities to request it for lawful purposes,” Henderson told the Washington Examiner in response to the letter from DOJ Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates, who heads the department’s Civil Rights Division, and Maureen Riordan, who leads the DOJ’s Section on Civil Rights Division.
“We’ll address that if it comes,” she continued, “but so far we haven’t identified any federal or state statute that would justify handing over to the federal government the personal identifying information of 2.1 million Utah voters.”
The DOJ’s move comes as it seeks to ensure states are enforcing federal regulations on elections, including key aspects of an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March. That order, among other things, targeted the enforcement of a prohibition on foreign nationals voting in federal elections.
The DOJ has sought information on over a dozen states’ voter rolls as it examines whether they are in compliance with the law. In some cases, the requests have been fairly narrow, following the scope of traditional examination of data. In other cases, requests have been more expansive, with states like Utah arguing the government does not hold jurisdiction over the information and criticizing the Trump administration’s expansive scope of data demands as out of bounds.
In addition to Utah, several other states, including those where election authority positions are held by both Democrats and Republicans, have rejected the DOJ’s requests.
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Those states include Maine and New Hampshire, where Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan answered some of the DOJ’s questions last month, but warned others “ask for information that poses a cybersecurity risk if disclosed.”
“As you know, the Department of Homeland Security regards election systems and assets as ‘critical infrastructure,’ defined by Congress as ‘systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters,” the New Hampshire Repbulican wrote in a letter. “New Hampshire law authorizes the Secretary of State to release the statewide voter registration list in limited circumstances not applicable here,” he said.