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Miniature ballot box with and image of the Colorado state flag on a red background with slips of paper representing ballots

Trump administration again requests sensitive Colorado voter data, state declines

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Lindsey Toomer
(Colorado Newsline)

Colorado’s top election official declined a Trump administration request this week to share extensive voter information.

The request was the latest administration effort to extract details about registered voters in the state. Secretary of State Jena Griswold previously shared only publicly available voter roll information in response to U.S. Department of Justice requests. The latest request seeks more sensitive data.

“We will not comply with the Trump Department of Justice’s request for Coloradans’ sensitive voting information,” Griswold, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The DOJ can take a hike; it does not have a legal right to the information. Colorado will not help Donald Trump undermine our elections and hurt the American people.”

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Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold - public domain

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division asked Griswold’s office Monday to enter into an agreement to share unredacted voter data including full names, dates of birth, addresses and identification numbers including a full driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.

Griswold’s office has already shared copies of the state’s master voter list and a copy of the master voter history list. The data includes the names of voters, addresses, birth year, and, if provided by the voter, phone numbers. This is all public information.

The agreement the DOJ proposed to Colorado says its purpose is to verify the state’s compliance with federal election record maintenance rules. An attorney with the Civil Rights Division said the new request was a follow-up to the original request in May.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

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Two election ballots with a padlock and chain representing election security

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The Colorado request is part of a Trump administration effort to collect voter information from states across the country, which raises concernsabout the security of the information and future elections, according to election security advocates. The initial Colorado request, which sought “all records” related to the 2024 election, was among the most sweeping.

Federal officials later acknowledged that the DOJ shared voter roll information with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to search it for noncitizens as a way to “scrub aliens from voter rolls.”

Griswold and other Democratic secretaries of state wrote to Trump administration officials in November expressing concern that the administration misled them about how it would use voter data collected from their states. Griswold has said voter data requests are just one of many ways the Trump administration has “made our elections less secure.”

In response to a Newsline inquiry about the latest request for sensitive data, Natalie Baldassarre, a DOJ spokesperson, included department announcements of lawsuits against other states that refused to supply sensitive voter data, appearing to suggest that Colorado could be at risk. The Trump administration has sued multiple states that have refused to provide the DOJ with their voter rolls.

Jack Todd, a spokesperson for Griswold, said “it certainly seems possible” that Colorado will be sued for refusing to provide voter data considering how many other states the DOJ has sued. “But only time will tell,” he said in a statement.