LAST WEEK IN Rhode Island, in a hearing over the Trump administration’s efforts to access the state’s unredacted voter lists, US district judge Mary McElroy asked a Department of Justice lawyer what the agency had been doing with the voter roll data it already amassed from other states in recent months.
“We have not done anything yet,” said Eric Neff, the acting chief of the agency’s voting section, a core part of the DOJ’s civil rights division that focuses on enforcing federal laws that protect the right to vote. Neff added that the data the DOJ collected from states—which can include Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, dates of birth, and addresses—was being kept separate.
“The United States is taking extra concern to make sure that we’re complying with the Privacy Act in every conceivable way,” Neff added. The Privacy Act of 1974 regulates how government agencies collect and use personally identifiable information about US residents.
But Neff was not telling the truth: The DOJ, he later admitted, was pooling the data and already analyzing it to identify voting irregularities.
In a court document filed on March 27, Neff walked back his claims. “The United States represented that each data set was stored separately,” Neff wrote. “The United States also stated that no analysis had yet been conducted on the data. To correct and clarify the record, preliminary internal data analysis of the nonpublic voter registration data has begun. In particular, the Civil Rights Division has begun the process of identifying and quantifying the number and type of duplicate and deceased registered voters in each state.”
