AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Department of Justice under President Trump is escalating its push to get elections data that it has never had access to before. This month, DOJ sued eight different states attempting to make them give up their voter registration lists. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks is covering this and joins us now. Hi, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey there.
CHANG: OK, so why does the Justice Department even want this data?
PARKS: I mean, that is the million-dollar question that has been floating around all summer since the department first started asking dozens of states for these voter registration lists. DOJ says it needs the state registration list to effectively judge whether states are following federal election laws when it comes to removing ineligible voters - people who have died or moved. But states have constitutional authority to run their own elections, and the federal government has never had these lists in their entirety before, which is why voting officials from both political parties at this point have mostly said no way to these requests since the data DOJ is asking for is not just the public records versions of these voting registration lists. It's the versions that include private sensitive information like partial Social Security numbers and driver's licenses.
CHANG: OK, very sensitive data. OK, so Justice Department announces lawsuits first against, I understand, Maine and Oregon, then against six more states. How are all these states responding now?
PARKS: They are preparing to go to court. I was just talking to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who's a Democrat who's also running for governor there. And she told me she's actually looking forward to litigation because she's hoping she can get answers about these requests that the Department of Justice has not given voting officials.
JOCELYN BENSON: When I and other secretaries have asked how they plan to protect voters' data, we are not given a straight answer. We are not given any concrete justification or government interest that's being served here. So now they can give one to a judge.
PARKS: And again, it is not just Democrats who are pushing back. The DOJ sued two swing states - New Hampshire and Pennsylvania - that have Republican election officials. Pennsylvania's Republican secretary of state, Al Schmidt, called the data requests unprecedented and unlawful.
CHANG: Well, do you have any sense of whether the courts will see it the same way?
PARKS: It is really hard to say for certain since the federal government has never asked for this data before, and therefore, this issue and the way it interacts with election laws that are close to 40 years old haven't really been tested. I was talking with Michael Morse, who is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work focuses on voter registration. And he noted that the new head of DOJ's voting section came from a conservative law firm that has made similar arguments to the ones mentioned in these suits.
MICHAEL MORSE: No request like this has ever been successful. Yeah, could it be successful this time? I mean, I don't know. We're in a crazy world, but it is an unprecedented request.
PARKS: I should note, though, that if DOJ isn't able to access these registration lists, numerous election officials told me that they still expect Trump and his allies to then use that as evidence of some sort of corruption in the midterms.
CHANG: Wait, wait. Let me just get this straight. So you're saying either voting officials give DOJ this data, which they do not think is legal, or basically feed conspiracy theories about their work?
PARKS: Right. I mean, it puts states in a pretty tough spot, right?
CHANG: Yeah.
PARKS: Benson, the secretary of state of Michigan, told me that since Trump took office this year, he's been working to expand the federal government's role in elections, and part of that means sowing doubt in whether states can run voting themselves. We saw this in the spring when Trump issued an executive order on voting, much of which has been blocked by courts, specifically because judges said the president does not have the authority to make rules about elections. But now we will see how the judicial branch handles these DOJ requests, which if they're successful, they do open the door for the federal government to basically be able to amass federal voter registration lists without the approval of Congress.
CHANG: That is NPR's Miles Parks. Thank you so much, Miles.
PARKS: Thank you.
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