Your browser doesn't support audio playback.
Personal information from registered West Virginia voters will not be turned over to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), said Secretary of State Kris Warner.
“Just not gonna happen, mainly because West Virginia law says we’re not going to share personal information,” Warner said. “If the DOJ wants the list, they can purchase it like anyone else, but it’s not going to have personal information on it.”
His office reported receiving the second such demand from the DOJ Feb. 4, seeking unredacted information on hundreds of thousands of registered voters in this state including names, dates of birth, residential addresses, drivers license numbers and the last four digits of social security numbers. Warner says federal officials claim they want to enforce voter list maintenance laws. But his office is already doing that, removing 64,000 voter registrations in the last year and registering another 350,000.
“So you put it all together, we have over 750,000 voter records out of 1.1 million total registered voters on our statewide list, and those have been confirmed and up to date and accurate in that same time period that we’re talking about. So we’re doing it. We’re doing it well,” Warner said.
“Our 55 county clerks have taken on a Herculean effort to make that happen, and this is an area where the federal government can’t do it any better than we’re doing so we’re following the law. I understand where maybe President Trump, what he’s trying to do, making sure that we have safe, secure, fair and honest elections, but the constitution leaves this up to us in the states.”
Other states have received similar demands from the DOJ. Some have complied but others have not.
“This Department of Justice has now sued 23 states for failing to provide voter roll data and will continue filing lawsuits to protect American elections,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a DOJ news release. “Accurate voter rolls are the foundation of election integrity, and any state that fails to meet this basic obligation of transparency can expect to see us in court.”
Warner said some courts have ruled against the DOJ – including one case as recently as Tuesday.
“A Trump appointed judge in the Western District of Michigan dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the Secretary of State there in Michigan, and it was over refusing to turn over their state’s private voter data,” Warner said. “We’ve also heard DOJ come on the national news and talk about how they’re coming after every Secretary of State and every state that doesn’t turn over this information.”
West Virginia previously received a request for voter data in September. Warner refused, but welcomed the DOJ to request publicly available voter registration data.
Read Warner’s letter to the Department of Justice here.