Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt should be commended for his prudence in responding to inappropriate Department of Justice requests for sensitive information about the state’s voters.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the states are the primary election authorities: Meddling from Washington must be accompanied by a strong legal justification, such as having probable cause to investigate wrongdoing, which has not been provided in this case.

The best that can be said for the Trump administration’s request is that it’s a fishing expedition, whose purpose is to discover evidence of malfeasance hidden in Pennsylvania’s master voter rolls. More likely, however, the Philadelphia-based good-government organization Committee of Seventy is correct when it argues that the true purpose of DOJ’s intervention is to “sow doubt in our elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” by laying “the groundwork for rejecting results in the event of a loss” by  Trump’s party.

On Aug. 4, according to letters obtained by the Post-Gazette, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael E. Gates wrote to Schmidt to request the commonwealth’s entire internal voter registration list, along with “a list of the election officials who are responsible for implementing Pennsylvania’s general program of voter registration list maintenance.”

Ten days later, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon followed up, clarifying that the department required all voter data, including drivers license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, and asserting dubious legal justifications for the demand.

The DOJ officials claim that the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the 1960 Civil Rights Act all give the U.S. Attorney General enforcement authority regarding election integrity. This is true enough.

But these laws do not give DOJ authority to seek sensitive and privileged information willy-nilly, without compelling evidence of a violation that requires an enforcement action. This is exactly what Schmidt said in his thorough and polite response, in which he offered publicly available voter data but not the sensitive private information demanded by the administration.

Schmidt is a Republican who served as the minority-party member of the Philadelphia City Commission, which is essentially the city-county’s elections board, and who came to prominence in 2020 for rebuffing President Donald Trump’s claims of fraud. Trump personally and publicly attacked Schmidt during that episode.

The fundamental principle at stake here is constitutional. Article I, Section 4 reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” This established, nearly 250 years ago, that the states have the primary responsibility for administering elections.

Over the years, the federal government has established parameters within which the states must operate, including various civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act, NVRA and HAVA. Among these federal rules are guidelines for maintaining voter registration lists, which the U.S. Attorney General has the authority to enforce.

But DOJ must have a reason for demanding a state’s internal data. If the department had probable cause to begin an enforcement action against the Department of the Commonwealth for its list maintenance practices, of course it could demand registration information. But it doesn’t, so it can’t.

In rebuffing DOJ, Schmidt is doing his job, and doing it well. It’s not the first time he has had to do so in the fact of pressure from Trump, and it’s unfortunately unlikely to be the last.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via TNS