Trump is coming for our voter information. Idaho must fight it | Opinion
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane — with apparent support from the Idaho Attorney General’s Office — has so far pushed back against the Department of Justice’s intrusion into elections, a power reserved for state legislatures.
Up until this point, Idaho has tiptoed quietly past Justice’s demands for voter roll information, handing over already publicly available data and scrubbing out identifiers.
But no more. Someone at the Justice Department must have noticed that Idaho hasn’t been giving them exactly what they want, and now they’re coming for Idaho’s voter rolls, threatening to sue if they don’t get their way.
The Department of Justice is seeking unredacted voter personal identifying information, which includes such data as full birthdates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and parts of Social Security numbers.
Good for McGrane for protecting Idahoans’ privacy and not disclosing such information, which could be misused or even weaponized to go after or challenge the eligibility of voters who vote a certain way.
McGrane, true to his nature, so far has been polite about the whole matter.
But at some point, McGrane, a self-described election nerd, is going to have to pull out his pocket Constitution, take off the kid gloves and recite chapter and verse Article 1, Section 4: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
In other words, to the federal government: Butt out.
If this were a demand from the Biden administration, Idaho’s conservatives and states’ rights folks would be yelling bloody murder.
Turning over the information would also violate an Idaho law that limits sharing voting data with third parties, as McGrane pointed out to the Idaho Capital Sun.
The Department of Justice has used any number of federal statutes to justify its demand to get our personal information, such as the National Voting Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and even the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
But these laws don’t allow for a wide-ranging, blanket demand for unredacted voter information from the states.
Some observers worry — not without reason — that the Trump administration will act to disrupt or upset the midterm elections to tilt the scales in Republicans’ favor. Republicans already are implementing mid-decade gerrymandering in certain states to ensure Republican victories to maintain control of the House and Senate, recognizing that they’ll have trouble winning fair and square in the midterms. Some Democratic states are considering their own gerrymandering in response, with California even passing a proposition that allowed for a new congressional map.
Democratic control of both or even one of those bodies would slow Trump’s shockingly swift and relentless march toward authoritarianism.
Of course, Trump has little to worry about in ruby-red Idaho — he won the state in 2024 with 67% of the vote.
But the principle remains the same: The federal government’s executive branch has no business in the administration of elections.
The Justice Department’s pretext of needing the records to weed out undocumented immigrants is specious. Idaho already scrubbed its voter rolls, and out of a million registered voters, elections officials found only about 30 cases of noncitizens registering, and some of those appear to have been paperwork lags.
Some states have bowed to Trump’s pressure, and that’s bad for the Constitution.
McGrane and Attorney General Raúl Labrador, as constitutional officers in one of the most Republican states in the country, would send a clear and leading message by refusing the Justice Department’s orders.
Election meddling is not a partisan issue; it’s a constitutional and states’ rights issue.
And one thing that’s not negotiable in a Republican state that believes strongly in state sovereignty and the notion of federalism is adherence to the Constitution.
McGrane’s nice-guy attitude, while admirable and refreshing in today’s coarsened political landscape, isn’t going to get him far in this fight. Trump chews up and spits out nice guys like McGrane — even if he is a Republican.
This puts McGrane in a quandary, as he has thus far gingerly navigated between the Idaho MAGA land mines for years.
At some point, there will be a line of demarcation, a bridge too far, when a spine is necessary, even if it means a future defeat at the ballot box.
McGrane has played the nice guy so far, and look what it’s gotten him. The Justice Department is still coming after Idaho’s voter rolls and threatening to sue.
“We welcome a dialogue with your office to continue to discuss the broader efforts to ensure the accuracy of Idaho’s voter rolls,” McGrane wrote to the Justice Department in September.
Their response?
“You may have seen in the news that we have sued six states earlier this week for refusing to provide their voter registration lists,” a Justice Department lawyer said in a Dec. 4 voicemail to the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office. “And we’re preparing additional lawsuits. I’d like to keep everyone out of that as much as possible. But I haven’t heard anything back from you all.”
So we encourage McGrane to play hardball, too.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
McGrane and Labrador should hold a joint press conference on the steps of the Capitol and tell the Justice Department, in no uncertain terms, to go pound sand, that the request is patently unconstitutional, unlawful, overbroad and an infringement on Idaho’s sovereignty and Idahoans’ privacy. They should say that Idaho will fight like hell to protect your and my protected data.
Maybe they could get some members of the Idaho Legislature’s Committee on Federalism to join them.
You know, pretend that the demand for voter information is coming from the Biden administration.
Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, assistant editor Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.