A wholesale invasion of Alaskans' privacy

The Dunleavy administration has violated the privacy of more than a half-million Alaskans and quietly surrendered control of a vital state function to the Trump administration.

It has signed off on a scheme to have the Trump administration decide who is eligible to vote in Alaska.

We’ve never had a clearer example of succumbing to illegal federal overreach without a whimper.

The Legislature needs to investigate and demand that the state cancel this agreement and do what it can about the wholesale invasion of Alaskans’ privacy.

Voter registration records are public. Anyone can get a list of eligible voters. That’s not what is going on here.

The Dunleavy administration has given the background data from the voter rolls to the Department of Justice, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

In this confidential memo the state signed in December, it gave up on local control of elections.

Most states have refused to sign this memo, but the Dunleavy administration can never say no to Trump.

There is even language in the memo from Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon that says the memo was proposed, made and entered into at the request of the state of Alaska. This is to make it appear that the memo didn’t originate with Trump’s underlings.

The Department of Justice is not qualified to test, assess and analyze the validity of Alaska’s voter rolls.

But after the Department of Justice completes this work that it is not qualified to do, the state will have 45 days to “clean” the list “by removing ineligible voters” identified by the Trump administration. Then the state will have to submit the revised voter rolls to the Department of Justice for approval.

Eileen O’Connor of The Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy organization, wrote of this agreement that it “reveals both the DOJ’s plans to interfere with the states’ authority to run elections and how dangerously insecure the sensitive data will be in the department’s hands. It provides yet more evidence of the administration’s campaign to interfere with upcoming elections.”

“Some states that have provided the DOJ with their full voter files, such as Texas and Alaska, have signed the agreement while others, such as Tennessee and South Dakota, have refused,” O’Connor wrote.

“This would turn the American system of election administration upside down. It is the states, not the federal government, that have the statutory authority — not to mention the expertise — to add and remove voters from the rolls. States also have procedures in place to guard against eligible voters being wrongly removed,” said O’Connor.

The Anchorage Daily News had a story on the state’s handover of voter data, but it was published on Christmas Eve and did not get the attention it deserved. Plus, the story focused only on the sharing of voter information with the Department of Justice.

The story did not mention that the state had agreed to allow the Department of Justice to determine which voters should be removed from the rolls.

The story said the Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who is running for governor, released a statement saying there had been a “thorough” legal review.

The Legislature needs to see the “thorough” legal review. It appears that temporary Attorney General Stephen Cox must have decided that the state ought to invite the Department of Justice to intrude in Alaska elections. It’s another reason why the Legislature should refuse to confirm him in the job.

The 45-day demand would violate federal law, Tennessee officials said.

The agreement signed by Alaska appears to be illegal because you cannot remove names in 45 days from voter lists and you cannot remove names from voter lists right before an election.

“The National Voter Registration Act requires states to undertake a specific process to remove voters who have moved. That process involves sending a notice to the voter and — if the voter does not respond and does not vote — the jurisdiction must wait two federal election cycles to remove the voter from the rolls. That’s far longer than 45 days. Additionally, the National Voter Registration Act has a ‘quiet period’ of 90 days before any federal election (primary or general), during which time a state may not conduct systematic removals of voters who have become ineligible,” the Brennan Center said.

The Dunleavy administration should never have signed this agreement. The Legislature must act.

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