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Secretary of State tells committee Minnesota will not hand identifiable voter records to DOJ without court rulings; contrasts ERIC hashed data sharing
Summary
Secretary Steve Simon told the House committee that Minnesota declines to provide raw, identifiable voter files requested by the U.S. Department of Justice and that the state’s membership in ERIC uses cryptographic hashing to protect personally identifiable information.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told the House Prevent Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee on June 13 that his office is resisting a federal request for identifiable voter records, saying the Department of Justice has not met legal standards required to obtain that data and that Minnesota will litigate the issue if necessary.
Simon said the data the Department of Justice has sought in litigation would include “very private data on millions of Minnesotans” — Social Security numbers and driver’s license information in native form — and stressed that the state already shares voter and driver‑license data with the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) in a protected form. “That data is always sent via secure encrypted transmission, and sensitive personal identifying information like date of birth, driver’s license number or Social Security number is converted into a string of random characters…
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