Trump administration files appeal in Rhode Island voter data privacy case

President Donald Trump’s administration appealed a Rhode Island federal judge’s decision barring its probe for sensitive information of Rhode Island voters, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The notice of appeal filed by the U.S. Department of Justice alerted the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island that the Justice department will be asking the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to review, and potentially undo, an April 17 ruling by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy.

McElroy denied the Justice department’s demands for an unredacted copy of Rhode Island’s statewide voter registration list from Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore. The unredacted datasets requested by the DOJ last year included voters’ driver’s license numbers as well as the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

Amore offered to provide a masked version of this dataset with names, dates of birth, addresses and other information intact, but he refused to give up the driver’s license and Social Security info. That triggered a lawsuit from the DOJ in December — similar to ones filed in 29 other states, per a tracker from the Brennan Center for Justice — that they hoped would force states to relinquish the data.

The case was eventually joined by a number of intervenors interested in defending voters’ privacy.

McElroy sided with Amore and his allies, determining that the feds had not sufficiently provided a factual or legal basis for their arguments, which rested on alleged voter list maintenance violations under the the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

During arguments before McElroy in March, DOJ attorney Eric Neff acknowledged that the department meant to share the data it obtained with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Federal district courts in California, Oregon, Michigan and Massachusetts have dismissed similar lawsuits brought against their states’ election officials.

The DOJ has only filed its intent to appeal, but not yet submitted a merits brief or other accompanying documents detailing its arguments to the appellate court.

The Justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday about the possible timeline for its future filings in the appellate court.

“DOJ’s appeal hardly comes a surprise,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha wrote in an emailed statement Thursday to Rhode Island Current. “We are confident the District Court got it right and we are prepared to defend its decision before the First Circuit.”