Consider the following scenario:

You receive a letter in the mail, a few days before a November election, stating that some irregularities have been noticed in your voter registration, making it invalid, and that if you vote in the upcoming election, you would be committing a crime punishable by fine, incarceration, or both. The letter is from the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights division to be more precise, with official seal and emblem. There is little time before the election for you to find proper representation to contest the letter, let alone seek reversal. So you decide it’s not worth the risk and decide to sit out that election. The election day passes, with the candidate(s) from the party opposing to the one you have registered to vote under announced as the winner(s). A few weeks later, you receive another letter from the Department of Justice saying the original letter was sent in error and that it should be discarded. Soon you learn you were not the only person who had received such letters. Several hundred thousand individuals, mostly in the swing states, had received similar letters. It becomes clear that it had been a dirty political game, to trick some into not voting in that particular election. But its already too late.

According to the US constitution, it’s the states’ responsibility to handle voter registrations and hold elections, even the federal ones. The electoral college system is actually very closely related to this notion. States maintain their voter data, have access to their citizenship data, and most likely regularly cross check these two sets of data to identify illegal voting activities. And so far, there has been no official data or statistics released by the federal or any state government indicating widespread illegal voting. If anything, the existing data has shown the exact opposite. One of the largest investigations of voting integrity was done in Georgia after the contested presidential elections of 2020, which indicated fewer than 20 potentially illegal voter registrations out of 3,000,000; that’s less than 0.001%. The narrowest margins in any swing state have been several orders of magnitude larger. So, when the Department of Justice of the current administration sends letters to mostly blue or swing states asking for their complete voter data, the expressed purpose of preventing voter fraud is highly doubtful. The scale of any known or potential illegal voting activity is not anywhere close to justify the cost of collecting and maintaining voter data from the states, just to cross check them with that of USCIS or DHS, something that the states can, and very likely already, do on their own. But a scenario similar to the one described above can very well explain the sudden interest of the federal government in the states’ voter data. And that is only one example of what a politically motivated administration can do with such data.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no issue with my voter data, or any data of mine for that matter, to be collected or maintained by the government. I am probably among the very few who believe individual privacy can be sacrificed for the safety and security of the entire society. And many of my friends are already tired of me advocating for a kind of transparency that most Americans probably consider too excessive. But that does not mean that I support governments doing whatever they want with that data. I believe the transparency should go both ways. That the government should in turn provide sufficient transparency so that people trust it with their data. More specifically, and at a minimum, I believe the government should provide a verifiable guarantee that:

• every access to such data is properly logged, as it is done in most technology companies,
• such access logs are available to public and the press upon request, and
• any access to any individual’s data and the subsequent internal communications regarding that data is proactively communicated to that individual.

Unless such level of transparency is provided into the way voter data is used by the federal government, the current attempts, bordering on intimidation, of the Justice Department to coerce the states to hand over their voter data to the federal government is bound to be met with a high degree of suspicion and skepticism, especially when the recent letter from the Attorney General to the Governor of Minnesota seems to imply a promise that ICE’s unlawful activities including the recent fatal shootings of two US citizens in Minneapolis can be stopped if, among other things, the state agrees to hand over their voter data to the Justice Department.