In a win for election integrity, a United States District Court ruled yesterday the state of Maine cannot restrict the use of its voter roll data per the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
Way back in October 2019, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) — a law firm solely dedicated to election integrity issues — requested a copy of the state’s voter files. But Maine’s Secretary of State denied the firm’s request due to a state law restricting access to its rolls to preferred entities, i.e., political parties. PILF then sued for access in Feb. 2020.
But to render PILF’s case moot, Maine changed its law to allow access to its voter files as long as any research associated with the voter files was pre-approved by the state legislature. Because of that change, PILF was prohibited from comparing Maine’s voter rolls to New York’s so as to identify duplicate registrants that had moved between the states. As such, anything other than monitoring Maine’s compliance with cleaning its voter rolls risked triggering a severe fine, even as the NVRA outlaws hefty fines and use restrictions when accessing state voter roll data.
PILF then changed its suit to challenge Maine’s fines and use restrictions for its voter roll data.
During its lawsuit, PILF discovered that among those involved with drafting the changes to Maine state law were a lobbyist for the state’s Democratic Party and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a group that had sued the Presidential Advisory
