Harmeet Dhillon racks up another defeat in voter data grab

She's 0-4, and a fifth may be circling the drain.

Harmeet Dhillon (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Find the signal in Trump’s election misinformation noise.

After helping push Donald Trump’s lost cause as one of his 2020 campaign lawyers, now-Justice Department Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon built upon her unbroken string of defeats in her coast-to-coast effort to demand that states turn over voter roll data.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts found that Dhillon failed to provide the “the basis and the purpose” for her demand, as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

“Put simply, the statute requires a statement of why the Attorney General demands production of the requested records—and, as conveyed by the statute’s use of the definite article, the statement must be ‘the’ factual basis, not just a conceivable or possible basis,” U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin wrote in a 13-page order.

Dhillon, who tried to discredit Joe Biden’s electoral victory in her role as co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, has been the tip of the spear of Trump’s effort to use civil and criminal law to build a sprawling federal database. She sued 29 states and the District of Columbia demanding data, litigating only against states that didn’t comply with her demands. Some 17 Republican-led states, like Texas and Nebraska, willingly turned over their citizens’ data.

Every state that opposed Dhillon’s scheme has succeeded to date, including California, Oregon, and Georgia.

‘Racking up losses at a pretty impressive rate’

Within hours of the ruling, Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore alerted a federal judge of the new precedent.

“The court held that DOJ failed to comply with Title III’s statutory requirements because its demand did not contain the requisite ‘statement of the basis,’ which must reflect its ‘foundation in fact,’ rather than a bare legal citation to Title III itself,” Amore’s counsel for the state told the court in a letter, referring to the Massachusetts order.

The Rhode Island litigation recently provided insight into the federal voter database that the Trump administration is trying to build.

In a hearing held in late March, the Trump Justice Department’s Voting Section Chief Eric Neff told the judge that the data would be stored safely, securely and in compliance with federal law.

“The United States is taking extra concern to make sure that we’re complying with the Privacy Act in every conceivable way,” Neff said on March 27.

As first reported by Wired, Neff submitted a “Notice of Clarification” the next day admitting that wasn’t true.

“To correct and clarify the record, preliminary internal data analysis of the non-public voter registration data has begun,” Neff wrote. “In particular, Civil Rights Division has begun the process of identifying and quantifying the number and type of duplicate and deceased registered voters in each state.”

That rang alarm bells for voting rights expert David Becker, who once worked for the same office before becoming the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“This is just the latest in a long string of missteps and misrepresentations or misunderstandings by this now hollowed out Justice Department, hollowed out voting section, which is racking up losses at a pretty impressive rate over the last fourteen or so months,” Becker told All Rise News in a video interview.

Becker called it “unfathomable” to either not understand or misrepresent basic questions about how the government is handling or using the data.

Drawing upon his seven years experience at the Voting Section, Becker called the federal government unequipped to conduct list maintenance to weed out dead and duplicate voter registrations.

“DOJ is not equipped to do this,” he said. “They can’t do it, and legally, they are prohibited from doing it, which is one of the big problems with all of these cases in the first place. And then you get this additional layer where the DOJ is also not taking care of this data, not using it appropriately, putting this data at risk, and is likely violating the Federal Privacy Act at the same time.”

‘Unprecedented and illegal’

The federal judge presiding over the Rhode Island case hasn’t yet responded to the government’s admissions that Neff’s claim about the handling of the data was false.

But the episode adds to the controversy surrounding Neff’s appointment.

Like Dhillon, Neff advanced the ideas of election deniers, and his brief tenure at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office ended in scandal, litigation, and a heavy judgment leaving taxpayers on the hook for millions.

In 2022, Neff prosecuted the CEO of the Michigan-based voting company Konnech, claiming the company stored sensitive data about California poll workers on Chinese servers. The Los Angeles Times found that the county’s case originated from a tip by True the Vote, one of the right-wing charities behind a series of failed lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election.

The county’s case collapsed, leading to a $5 million judgment for the company and an admission that Konnech’s CEO Eugene Yu was innocent.

Becker, the election expert, said that nobody with Neff’s black mark on his record would have been let near the Justice Department during his pre-Trump tenure.

“Normally, that would be a disqualifier for even applying to the Department of Justice,” Becker said. “Now, it appears it’s a prerequisite to applying for the Department of Justice.”

Becker doubts that the Trump Justice Department can do much with the data even if they won these cases.

“I don’t know that the DOJ actually has any intentions to use this data for any actual real purpose because they don’t have the expertise,” he said. “They’re losing every single case in court. They’re getting incomplete data.”

But Becker believes the data could be used as disinformation to “delegitimize future elections — particularly, with false claims that will be used in case the president’s party doesn’t do well.”

In one respect, echoes of the post-2020 election already started reverberating.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who tossed the California voter data lawsuit in January, slammed Dhillon’s nationwide blitz as “unprecedented and illegal.”

“The foundation upon which American democracy has been built is the right to vote,” Carter wrote in January. “Brave Americans have given their lives for more than two hundred years to protect this right. Now it seems the Executive Branch of the United States government wants to abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots. This is what this case is grounded in—the right to vote and the government’s obligation to protect that right.”

That urgency to Carter’s prose had a history.

In 2022, Carter became the first federal judge to find that Trump and his lawyer John Eastman’s election subversion efforts likely amounted to felonies, calling their actions a “coup in search of a legal theory.” Two of the crimes that Carter listed, conspiring to defraud the United States and obstructing a lawful proceeding, ultimately became statutes that former special counsel Jack Smith charged against Trump.

Watch the full interview with David Becker below on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.