Trump administration suing Colorado Secretary of State in latest attempt to seize voter data
COLORADO (KRDO) – The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold after she refused to provide the agency with sensitive information about the state's registered voters.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, directs the Secretary of State's office to share a statewide voter registration list, including unredacted voter information like a voter's full name, date of birth, residential addresses, and either a full driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
The agency claims the information is needed to track down ineligible voters and snub potential voter fraud.
Griswold, however, argues that the Trump administration does not have the right to the state's data.
"We will not hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump," Griswold said in a release responding to the lawsuit. "He does not have a legal right to the information. I will continue to protect our elections and democracy, and look forward to winning this case."
The lawsuit follows months of back-and-forth between Griswold and the DOJ over access to the state's voting records.
In May, the DOJ initially sent a letter to the Secretary of State, asking her office to turn over all records connected to the 2024 election and to preserve any records remaining from 2020. The Secretary of State's Office responded by sharing publicly available data, which did not include social security numbers or driver's license numbers.
In November, Griswold joined 10 other Secretaries of State in writing a letter to the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking clarification on how the federal agencies were collecting and using state voter roll information, and whether officials had misled state officials about their purposes.
According to Griswold, neither the DOJ nor DHS has responded to the questions raised in that letter.
On Dec. 1, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division reached out to Griswold again, asking her office to voluntarily enter an agreement to share the unredacted voter data. Griswold rejected the request the following day, leading to the lawsuit filed on Thursday.
Colorado is just one of 18 states to be sued by the DOJ over access to voter records. Yesterday alone, the Justice Department announced it had also filed lawsuits against Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada for failing to produce statewide voter registration lists upon request.
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