Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed federal lawsuits against six states \u2013 including New York \u2013 seeking unredacted statewide voter registration lists. That includes trying to access information such as voters\u2019 social security numbers and drivers\u2019 license numbers.<\/p>\n
Last week, the League of Women Voters of New York State filed a motion to intervene in the case. The state\u2019s League of Women Voters\u2019 Executive Director, Erica Smitka says she is concerned that the government collecting such information could contribute to voter suppression.<\/p>\n
“We expect that they’ll use this information to do a few things. We think that they’re going to use it to continue to push falsehoods about election security and election fraud. We think they may use it to target potential political opponents,” Smitka said. “We know they’re working in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, so they may use it for immigration enforcement. And other things they might try to do are attempt to force states to remove voters from the database when they’re not eligible to be purged.” <\/p>\n
In response to an inquiry, the U.S. Department of Justice referred to a press release about the lawsuits, with a statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi that says, in part: \u201cClean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections.\u201d The release also says the attorney general is charged by Congress with the enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), federal laws meant to ensure states have \u201cproper and effective voter registration and voter list maintenance programs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cases are pending. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed federal lawsuits against six states \u2013 including New York \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-20456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}