Political Parties Join Legal Battle Over Wisconsin Voter Data

Only 61,634 votes were cast in the Feb 15., 2022 primary. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Both major American political parties are moving to get involved in a lawsuit over the federal government’s access to sensitive Wisconsin voter data.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican Party of Wisconsin have both filed motions in federal court seeking to join the suit on opposing sides.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking access to the complete voter rolls of every state in the country, including Wisconsin, trying to find evidence of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections, a claim President Donald Trump and his allies have long made without supporting evidence. In private communications to states and public statements, DOJ officials have shown they intend to involve the federal government in purging state voter rolls.

The DOJ claims it seeks the information to investigate whether Wisconsin is complying with federal election laws. Opponents charge that the DOJ has provided no evidence to suggest Wisconsin is not following the law and that the DOJ is looking for evidence to back up unsubstantiated claims that noncitizens or undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections.

After the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) refused to release voter information, the DOJ filed suit in federal court. Now the DNC is seeking to join the suit on behalf of WEC, and the state GOP is moving to join on the side of the DOJ.

The case has already drawn in high-powered election lawyers representing the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans and Forward Latino. These groups are backing the WEC. Recently, 17 former DOJ attorneys who worked on election-related cases filed a brief arguing the DOJ was overstepping its authority and using civil rights laws to go on a “fishing expedition” for “highly sensitive personal information from every voter in a State.”

The DOJ is making the same request to WEC in states across the country. Where its requests are denied, the DOJ is suing. The case against the WEC was filed by DOJ trial attorney Brittany Bennett. Prior to joining the DOJ under Trump, Bennett represented the Georgia Republican Party in a lawsuit arguing the state’s voting machines were not secure in the run-up to the presidential election.

The DNC moved to join the case in Wisconsin in early February. A brief asking to join the suit as a friend of the court was filed by attorneys Jonathan P. Hawley and Charles G. Curtis Jr. from Perkins Coie, one of the national law firms targeted by executive orders last year.

In its brief, the DNC argued the DOJ’s demand creates a privacy concern for the approximately 1.5 million registered Democrats in Wisconsin. “This demand forces registered Democrats and unregistered citizens who favor Democratic candidates to choose between electoral participation and data privacy,” according to the brief.

The brief also argues that the DOJ is misrepresenting the true reason it wants the voter records, and that it’s not engaged in routine enforcement of federal election laws. Rather, the DOJ “intends to transfer the personally identifying information and party affiliation of every registered voter in Wisconsin to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and is consolidating state databases into a national voter file,” the DNC argues.

The DNC is asking the court to toss the DOJ request and dismiss the case against the state elections commission, stating, “A DOJ that cannot be forthright with state officials cannot be trusted with the personal information of every registered voter in Wisconsin, including nearly 1,500,000 registered Democrats.”

On Feb. 17, the Wisconsin GOP also filed a brief asking to join the suit. Its filing was prepared by attorney Nicholas Boerke of NJB Law & Consulting. Boerke was in contact with attorneys in the 2020 fake electors plot as they attempted to overturn the results of the presidential election. He also showed up in text messages from former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as he conducted a discredited partisan review of the 2020 presidential election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“Why are so many Democrats and Democrat-aligned interest groups devoting substantial resources and fighting so hard to stop the Attorney General from simply investigating whether (and how many) ineligible voters are on active voter rolls?” the state GOP argues in its brief. “Because they fear what the investigation will discover and the threat that discovery poses to their electoral success and political power.”

The state GOP argues U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi would be stripped of her “well-settled investigatory powers” if the court dismisses the government’s request. The briefing also argues the DOJ is not attempting to create a “national voter roll” and says that argument is a “smokescreen” for the “real concern” about what the DOJ would find in the state’s voter data.

“Increasingly fueled by hyperbolic propaganda in today’s political discourse, many have lost touch with common sense and become cognitively blind to obvious truths,” the brief states. The state GOP asks the court to grant the DOJ’s motion to compel the release of state voter data, arguing that if election officials have nothing to hide they should comply with the request and “put all concerns to rest.”