PORTLAND — For more than 100 years, the League of Women Voters has worked to expand and protect voting rights.
Founded six months before women won the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the league pushed for passage of equal rights for women, sponsored televised presidential debates, and worked to make it easier to register to vote.
Now, in Maine, they are joining another fight.
Earlier this month, the league joined a lawsuit to support the state and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, both of which are being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice because of Bellows’ refusal to turn over the state’s voter files.
Jen Lancaster, communications director for the league’s Maine office, said they don’t believe the DOJ should play a role in overseeing elections.
“It’s unprecedented, it did kind of feel like a data grab and we didn’t know why they wanted to use this data,” she said. “It was very concerning.”
Lancaster said the DOJ request includes access to Social Security numbers and driver license numbers, which appear to be beyond what’s necessary to ensure voting integrity.
“There’s a very good reason why we don’t have a centralized voter database at the federal level,” she said. “One, it’s just a big cybersecurity issue. Our elections are decentralized. Every state has the right to run and manage their own elections.”
Lancaster said each state does things a little differently — and that’s intentional.
The larger concern for the league and others is that the DOJ could use the data to remove people they believe to be non-citizens from the voter rolls.
Lancaster noted that it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote. She said when people register, they must sign a statement that confirms that they are a legal citizen. If they get caught, they will be prosecuted and potentially deported.
“Non-citizen voting is a myth,” she said. “It’s not happening anywhere in Maine.”
The DOJ is suing 18 states for failing to turn over complete voter files. In a December statement announcing the addition of four states to the lawsuit — a list that includes Massachusetts and Colorado — the DOJ says it is charged with enforcing the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
Those federal laws seek to ensure “proper and effective voter registration and voter list maintenance programs,” according to the DOJ.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement. “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections’ laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
On December 12, the state and Bellows filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying that the DOJ request also seeks to find out the party affiliation of every voter and “in which elections they choose to vote.”
“DOJ demanded that the State hand over this sensitive data without even describing — despite repeated queries by the Secretary of State — a factual basis for its demand or how it planned to store, use or disseminate the data,” the state wrote in the dismissal request.
Lancaster said since 1920 the league has been working on voting protections, which includes data privacy. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, Lancaster said it’s even more important than ever to keep information secure.
“As the state of Maine, we have the right to run our own elections but also the right to protect our citizens and their data,” she said.
The suit is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine.