‘Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico’: States are now fighting lawsuits against Trump looking into your voting data

The Department of Justice is taking two states to court in an escalating battle over voter data, and it sounds like things are getting heated. The Trump administration’s DOJ has announced lawsuits against both Oregon and Maine, with the goal of forcing them to hand over their voter registration lists. These lists aren’t just names and addresses, either—the department wants access to sensitive personal information like partial Social Security numbers.

While the DOJ has been asking numerous states for this data, Oregon and Maine are the first to be hit with a lawsuit for refusing to comply. The DOJ’s official stance is that it needs the raw data to determine whether the states are following federal law for maintaining accurate voter rolls. According to Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, “States simply cannot pick and choose which federal laws they will comply with”.

According to NPR, she also added that “American citizens have a right to feel confident in the integrity of our electoral process, and the refusal of certain states to protect their citizens against vote dilution will result in legal consequences.” That sounds all right, until you realize how much of an invasion of privacy this is, on top of Trump hiring people who lied about elections already.

Your voting information will go to people who may not have liked how it went

On the other hand, the states are pushing back hard. Oregon’s Secretary of State, Tobias Read, didn’t mince words, saying, “If the President wants to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections, I look forward to seeing them in court”. He went on to emphasize his commitment to his constituents, stating, “I stand by my oath to the people of Oregon, and I will protect their rights and privacy”.

Maine’s Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, has her own serious concerns, particularly about data security. She called the DOJ’s request a “fishing expedition for sensitive voter information on every American” and warned that “The federal government has a terrible track record keeping private data safe”. This whole situation isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a long-running argument about voter list maintenance.

This has always frustrated groups on the right who want more aggressive list purging. It’s worth noting that officials like Dhillon and Maureen Riordan, who heads the DOJ’s Voting Section, have previously pushed what the provided text calls “false election fraud claims”. This isn’t the first time a Trump administration has tried to get its hands on this kind of data. Back in 2017, the then-Republican Secretary of State of Mississippi famously told the administration to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico” when they asked for similar information.

Trump has tried to bypass congress before on voting rights, but this seems to be a new way to invade your privacy. Maine’s Shenna Bellows echoed that line in response to this latest request. It’s a pretty telling phrase that shows just how unwelcome these demands are to state election officials across the board.

The bigger concern for many election officials is what the administration plans to do with the data once it has it. We know that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has already run over 33 million voter records through a citizenship verification tool, all without providing almost any information about the tool’s security or accuracy.