Civil rights advocates are suing over Alaska’s decision last year to share confidential voter data, including home addresses, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, with the federal government.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Alaska chapter, the national ACLU’s Voting Rights Project and the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit in Alaska Superior Court in Anchorage Wednesday on behalf of the League of Women Voters and the Alaska Black Caucus.
The groups say in the lawsuit that turning over the state’s full voter rolls to the Justice Department violated the privacy clause of the Alaska Constitution.
And the complaint says an agreement to purge voters from Alaska’s rolls if the federal government identifies them as ineligible violates due process and voting rights protections “by giving DOJ the power to select which Alaskans have the right to vote and by obligating Defendants to purge voters from the voter list without any stated basis in law or process to challenge such an action.”
The state has its own process for removing voters identified as ineligible, said Eric Glatt, the ACLU of Alaska’s legal director.
“It’s a detailed process. We don't think there's anything wrong with that process,” he said in an interview. “There's no need for the federal government to insist on who should and should not be eligible to vote in Alaska.”
The suit names Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees the division, as defendants. The Division of Elections is in charge of maintaining the state’s voter list, and Dahlstrom, who is also running for governor, signed the agreement in question with the Justice Department.
If the federal government identifies ineligible voters on Alaska’s rolls, the agreement Dahlstrom signed states unequivocally that the state “will clean its (voter registration list)/data by removing the ineligible voters” within 45 days.
Experts have raised concerns that the database the federal government is using to identify ineligible voters is flawed and frequently flags voters who are, in fact, eligible.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Law, Sam Curtis, said Wednesday afternoon that state officials had yet to be served with the lawsuit. But in a statement, Curtis said the complaint ignores a state law that explicitly allows the state to share confidential information with other governments for legitimate purposes authorized by law.
“The disclosure is consistent with Alaska's constitutional right to privacy because the legislature implemented that right through the statute at issue, balancing individual privacy interests with the state's compelling interest in complying with federal election laws,” state attorneys wrote in a letter to legislators last month.
A memo from legislative counsel earlier this year cast doubt on that interpretation of the statute in question, given that court challenges in other states found the Justice Department was not legally entitled to the voter data it sought. The state Department of Law said those cases were legally distinct from Alaska’s, given that the state sought to comply with the Justice Department request rather than challenge it.
Dahlstrom did not return a phone call seeking comment. But in an op-ed published in the Juneau Empire last month, Dahlstrom said the state retains full control of its voter rolls. Despite the plain text of the agreement with the Justice Department, she said the Division of Elections would still follow its established procedures for removing ineligible voters from the rolls.
Glatt, with the ACLU, said that promise conflicts with the document Dahlstrom signed. The plaintiffs are seeking a court order to make that promise binding.
“Unfortunately, I think the only way Alaskans can be assured that they will not be disenfranchised from voting is by making sure that the Division of Elections and the state of Alaska commit to doing what's required of them in court,” he said.
The plaintiffs are also seeking a permanent injunction barring the state from turning over additional confidential voter data and a ruling that the decision to turn over voter data violated the state Constitution.
For now, though, the plaintiffs are not seeking faster action through a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction, so it could be months or years before a ruling on the issue.
