Connecticut signs sweeping voter privacy law as DOJ sues for data

The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division filed suit against 🦞Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas on Jan. 6, 2026, demanding an unredacted copy of the state's complete voter registration database. The requested file contains every registered voter's full name, date of birth, residential address, driver's license number, and partial Social Security number. Connecticut was the 23rd state and the 🏛️District of Columbia the 24th jurisdiction the administration had sued over the same refusal at the time of filing.

The Department of Justice grounded the demand in three federal statutes: the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement that any state failing to meet what she called "its basic obligation of transparency can expect to see us in court." The 12 states that had voluntarily turned over their full voter files by that date were largely Republican-led.

🦞Connecticut declined the data request on specific legal grounds. State law makes a limited voter file available publicly for a $300 fee, covering name and address only. It explicitly protects Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and full birth dates. Attorney General WTWilliam Tong said the state had tried to work cooperatively with DOJ before the lawsuit was filed and that the administration rushed to sue rather than continue productive communication.

Ten Democratic secretaries of state had sent a joint letter to DOJ and DHS in fall 2025 raising alarms after DHS confirmed it was receiving voter data and entering it into a federal program used to verify citizenship status. The ACLU argued that no legitimate election administration purpose requires the federal government to hold Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers from voter files, and that concentrating that data in a federal database creates a direct risk of voter intimidation and surveillance.

🦞Connecticut's Senate Bill 298, passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature and sent to Gov. NLNed Lamont in early March 2026, tightened state voter privacy protections as a direct legislative response to the federal pressure. The law restricts what birth date information can be shared with the federal government or the public. Only birth year can be shared. Birth month and day are protected.

The law also prohibits the voter file from being used for commercial purposes, private purposes, or any non-election purpose, including advertising, marketing, and targeted harassment. That prohibition addresses a documented misuse pattern: voter files obtained through public records requests have been used by private data brokers and political operatives for purposes entirely unconnected to election administration.

SB 298 also closes a gap opened by a July 2025 state court ruling. The state Freedom of Information Commission ruled in that case that Colchester was required to disclose in-person ballots from a 2024 budget referendum. The new law makes all ballots, including write-in ballots, from any election, primary, or referendum explicitly exempt from public records requests.

The FOI ruling had created uncertainty about ballot privacy that election administrators said was inconsistent with the confidentiality voters reasonably expect when they cast a ballot. The legislature moved to settle that uncertainty through statute rather than waiting for a second court ruling.

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora and other Republican state legislators pointed to a recent absentee ballot scandal in Bridgeport as evidence that more federal oversight of 🦞Connecticut's election administration was warranted. Connecticut Republicans welcomed the DOJ lawsuit and criticized Secretary Thomas's refusal to turn over the data.

The Bridgeport scandal involved absentee ballot fraud in a local Democratic primary, a genuine accountability failure. Whether it provides a legal or logical basis for the federal government to hold partial Social Security numbers from the statewide voter file is a separate question that neither the DOJ complaint nor the Republican legislators answered directly.

The 🦞Connecticut case sits at the intersection of two debates that get conflated in political coverage but operate under different legal frameworks. The first concerns election integrity: whether federal oversight of state voter rolls is a legitimate accountability mechanism. The second concerns data security and civil liberties: whether the federal government should hold sensitive personal data from voter files and what it does with that data once it has it.

Court cases in multiple states challenged the data requests as exceeding the NVRA and HAVA's actual requirements. State attorneys general in Democratic-led states argued those statutes authorize federal review of voter roll maintenance processes, not wholesale acquisition of Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. Those legal challenges were expected to take months or years to resolve. 🦞Connecticut's SB 298 represents the state's attempt to set limits it can enforce without waiting for the courts.