Illinois has until Thursday to provide the Justice Department with more voter information about whether it’s complying with federal law on maintaining voter registration lists.
The state, which has had a reputation for voter fraud cases, provided partial information, but only information that is already publicly available.
On Monday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, took a more hardline stance. He declined to say if the State Board of Elections should provide more information to the Justice Department but accused the Trump administration of hunting for dead voters.
“Well, it’s clear why they’re hunting around for voter data, right? They’re trying to say that in the next election, that there will be fraud because they know they’re going to lose,” Pritzker told reporters, Capital News Illinois reported. “They are looking, essentially, to say that, well, we found somebody who died who’s still on the rolls, and therefore, there’s fraud, and therefore, these elections are fraudulent and should be overturned.”
“We have, actually, one of the safest, best systems in the entire country, because it’s run by individual county clerks, so it’s unhackable,” he said.
Pritzker has been out front in opposing the Trump administration and is the co-chairman of the organization Governors Safeguarding Democracy, a coalition of Democrat governors working against the Trump agenda.
Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, wrote an Aug. 14 letter to Illinois State Board of Elections Executive Director Bernadette Matthews.
“We have received Illinois’ statewide voter registration list (“VRL”). However, as the attorney general requested, the electronic copy of the statewide VRL must contain all fields, including the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number, as required under the Help America Vote Act,” Dhillon’s letter said.
The DOJ has sought to ensure states are complying with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which both require states to keep their voter registration lists updated and free of names of dead people or people listed as voters in jurisdictions where they no longer live.
“The request is currently under review. If necessary, we will request an extension before submitting our response,” Matt Dietrich, public information officer for the Board of Elections, told The Daily Signal in an email.
In July, the Justice Department filed a “statement of interest” in a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog, to force Illinois to comply with the National Voter Registration Act.
Illinois has the second highest number of documented voter fraud cases in the United States, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database that measures cases from 1982 to the present.
