Editorial: States right to keep voter rolls for proper purpose

Published 1:30 am Thursday, December 4, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

There are circumstances where redundancy has its place; say extra batteries when the lights have gone out and the flashlight is dim.

But in terms of states’ duty to register voters for elections and maintain that list of voters? No. There’s no need — and only opportunity for governmental mischief — in a redundant federal list of voters, as now sought by the Trump administration and its lawsuits against states that have balked at demands for the detailed personal information of voters that are necessarily held by each state to run elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday announced a lawsuit against Washington state and five other states over those states’ failure to submit their full lists of registered voters and their complete information, despite offers from Washington Secretary of State Steven Hobbs and other states’ election officials to provide information that is publicly available.

“Accurate voter rolls are the cornerstone of fair and free elections, and too many states have fallen into a pattern of noncompliance with basic voter roll maintenance,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in announcing the latest lawsuits. “The Department of Justice will continue filing proactive election integrity litigation until states comply with basic election safeguards.”

The latest round of lawsuits joins a similar spate of filings against other states that resisted the DOJ’s demand in May for sensitive information that includes driver’s license numbers, full birth dates and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers.

At least 27 states have been instructed to turn over their voter rolls; only two — Indiana and Wyoming — have fully complied.

In a September response to the Justice Department, Hobbs said the requested information is protected under state and federal law. His obligation was to assure the voter rolls comply with state and federal laws. An obligation that “also includes protecting Washington voters from unnecessary and illegitimate intrusions on their privacy,” he told the DOJ.

Hobbs offered Justice the same information that’s available to the public, including names, addresses, gender, year of birth, dates of elections that a voter participated in and voter registration numbers. That’s information sufficient to confirm states’ assurances that voter rolls are being properly maintained.

Bondi, and the assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division claim a federal list of registered voters is necessary to meet compliance with legislation adopted by Congress, specifically the National Voter Registration Act and the Help Americans Vote Act.

But Hobbs, in his response was dubious. “This is not the reason for your request,” he wrote.

His suspicions and that of other states’ elections officials are not unwarranted.

Many reasonably fear the information will be manipulated and hyped to further President Donald Trump’s longstanding and oft-repeated claims of voter fraud and rampant voting by non-citizens, allegations that have never been substantiated and have been repeatedly rejected through independent audits and court decisions.

Hobbs and others are also concerned that the information would be shared with the Department of Homeland Security and used in the administration’s immigration crackdown efforts, using election integrity as a cover, while putting that integrity at risk.

Homeland Security has disclosed that it plans to repurpose an information technology system — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program — which would scrape and process information from federal databases and the information provided by states, such as driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers.

Suspicious of SAVE — not to be confused with equally ill-advised voting legislation in Congress under the same acronym that has passed the House — Hobbs and 11 other secretaries of state filed a protest letter with Homeland’s chief privacy officer, raising concerns that the program was likely to misidentify eligible voters as non-citizens and chill participation in elections by eligible voters, noting it had not been proven as a reliable method of voter verification.

“While DHS claims that its changes to SAVE make it an effective tool for voter eligibility verification, the modifications to SAVE are likely to degrade, not enhance, State efforts to ensure free, fair, and secure elections,” their letter states. “The expanded version of SAVE will introduce unnecessary and unwarranted reliability, privacy and security issues into the sensitive voter information data we are entrusted to protect.”

Further, the secretaries warn, the federal database could expose “hundreds of millions of Americans’ private data to cyberattack and missuse.”

There is no need in creating a redundant — and unproven — federal voter registration list.

Empowered by the Constitution, states have the primary responsibility for running elections.

While Congress has the power to regulate the time, place and manner of federal elections, a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court precedent clarified that Congress’ authority is limited to the elections themselves and not the qualifications of voters. The 7-2 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, noted that nothing in the Constitution “lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.”

Congress can enact laws to ensure civil rights in elections; the rest is left to states.

With Washington state as an example, the states have taken that duty seriously.

Washington state’s VoteWA system — at a cost of $9.5 million — launched statewide online voter registration in 2019 that replaced 39 separate county registration systems, improving access to voter registration but also ferreting out duplicate registrations in counties and allowing for quicker detection of those voters who have died and those who have been convicted of felonies and are currently incarcerated and ineligible to vote.

As well, the state has protections in place to prevent ineligible people — including non-U.S. citizens — from registering to vote, requiring proof of identity that is checked against records from the state Department of Licensing and the federal Social Security Administration, under penalty of up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

If the Trump administration has concerns for an individual state’s maintenance of its voter rolls, it can bring forth that evidence and seek a solution through the courts.

Unsupported allegations that states are not complying with their constitutional duty are not an invitation to the federal government to usurp a responsibility entrusted to the states.