Secretary of State tells committee Minnesota will not hand identifiable voter records to DOJ without court rulings; contrasts ERIC hashed data sharing

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 as part of cryptographic hashing,” Paul Whannel, director of elections, explained during the hearing.

Why it matters

Committee members expressed concern about both voter privacy and the ability of federal investigators to use large datasets. The secretary’s office argued the ERIC process is privacy‑protective because hashed records cannot be traced back to an identifiable individual; DOJ’s request, by contrast, seeks identifiable information that the state says the requesters must justify in court.

Legal and procedural points made at the hearing

- Threshold for sharing: Secretary Simon said the federal request must meet two tests before Minnesota would share identifiable files: (1) a particularized legal showing of why the federal agency needs the specific data; and (2) a clear explanation of how the agency will use and protect the data. He described the dispute as appropriately resolved in court: “We’ll hash it out in court,” Simon said, adding that several other state secretaries of state have taken similar positions.

- ERIC vs. DOJ request: Committee testimony explained the difference between ERIC’s hashed, member‑state data exchange and a federal request for data in a form tied to individuals. Paul Whannel outlined ERIC’s hashing and secure transmission process and said Minnesota submits hashed files monthly. Simon said ERIC’s use is limited to list maintenance reports that return potential matches for county review.

- Data the state does and does not send: The secretary’s office described its role in providing driver‑license and voter‑registration data to ERIC under cryptographic protections. Simon stressed the state does not provide raw, identifiable Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers to DOJ in the native format the DOJ has requested; the state’s position has led to at least one federal lawsuit in which Minnesota and other states have refused the DOJ request.

Comments and context

Representative Pinto and others asked whether federal agencies had explained how they would combine or store the data; Simon said the DOJ had not satisfied the state’s legal criteria on purpose and particularity. Representative Freeman and others praised the emphasis on privacy protections for Minnesota voters. Simon also noted that the 2023 state automatic voter registration law changes what driver’s‑license transactions are forwarded to the secretary’s office: only transactions accompanied by citizenship‑affirming documents are submitted under that process.

Ending

The secretary framed the disagreement as a legal question for the courts to decide and urged that any federal request for identifiable records be subject to strict legal and privacy vetting. “If they were here, they would vigorously disagree with that position. But that’s exactly why we have courts,” Simon told the committee.