Copyright keenesentinel
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against New Hampshire and several other states for refusing to provide personal and private voter information. A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Concord on Thursday asks that New Hampshire provide the full name of people registered to vote as well as their date of birth, address and either their state driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. The suit seeks the “current statewide voter registration list, including active and inactive voters.” The Justice Department first asked for this information in a June 25 letter to the state. “Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a news release on Thursday. “Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure — states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.” N.H. Attorney General John Formella’s office acknowledged Friday that it had received the complaint and was reviewing it. N.H. Secretary of State David Scanlan’s office declined comment Friday. But Scanlan said in an Aug. 28 letter to Harmeet Dhillon, a U.S. assistant attorney general, that New Hampshire law prohibits him from sharing the requested information. He also said in the letter “there does not appear to be any provision under federal law that compels the production of voter registration data superseding the provisions of New Hampshire statutes that I must follow.” A state statute mandates that “the voter database shall be private and confidential.” President Donald Trump has made repeated unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and refused to accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Despite Trump’s claim of a rigged election, then Attorney General William Barr, who was appointed by Trump, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome. In addition to New Hampshire, other states facing Justice Department lawsuits to get registration data are California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Maine and Oregon. In 2022, Scanlan formed the Special Committee on Voter Confidence with the task of examining the state’s election system. The panel found the state’s elections are accurate, there’s no evidence of widespread fraud and ballot-counting devices are reliable. Meanwhile, this summer, New Hampshire gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture detailed, personal information on nearly a quarter-million recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. At least 21 other states and the District of Columbia are refusing the USDA’s demand for data covering the period from 2020 to the present. These states, including Maine and Massachusetts, assert in a federal lawsuit filed July 28 that releasing this information would threaten the privacy and security of people who use SNAP, which used to be called the Food Stamps Program. The suit also contends the federal government’s real purpose in seeking the personal information is to help it amass a searchable database that can be used to deport people. The USDA, in a May 6 letter asking for the information, said it was doing so to comply with President Trump’s March 20 executive order, “Stopping Waste, Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.”
