Bob Evnen speaks on election integrity and Common Cause lawsuit

As Nebraska’s secretary of state, Bob Evnen has his hands full. His official duties include promoting international trade, serving on the Pardons Board, chairing the Real Estate Commission and State Records Board, issuing licenses for polygraph operators, and overseeing business services such as corporate and LLC registrations and security interest filings. The most prominent role he’s had over the past few years, however, has been overseeing Nebraska’s elections — a responsibility that has come to the forefront in a lawsuit by Common Cause Nebraska seeking to prevent the inspection of Nebraska’s voter rolls.

Letter from the DOJ

Earlier this year, Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice (DOJ), sent letters to multiple states, including Nebraska, requesting voter lists and personal data. This included dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. So far, the letter has been sent to 38 states, and Evnen expects the remaining 12 will receive one soon.

This information was requested under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which require states to maintain accurate voter lists and authorize the DOJ to inspect records for compliance.

Evnen spoke about the matter at the River City Republicans’ luncheon on Wednesday. He said he had contacted the DOJ attorney listed in the letter for details on how the data would be used.

“She told me immediately how they’re going to use it, who’s going to have access to it, how they get access to it, what’s going to be done with the data, and how we get it back,” Evnen said. “And I asked her to provide that in writing, which she was agreeable to do.”

Common Cause Nebraska files suit

Before any of the information could be sent, however, Common Cause Nebraska filed a lawsuit to prevent Evnen from submitting the data. Common Cause has opposed other election-integrity measures such as voter ID. They also oppose President Trump’s Executive Order 14248, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which Evnen described as a “baseline of best practices.”

The current lawsuit raises concerns about hackers accessing sensitive data — an issue Evnen dismissed.

“This is not a request from some hacker on the dark web. This is the United States Department of Justice, which has given the Secretary of State of Nebraska assurances about how this information will be protected. That’s the difference.”

Much of the data in these voter rolls is already available to the general public under certain conditions, and the more sensitive data — such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth — is already in the possession of the federal government. One attendee I spoke with suggested the suit was simply an effort to roadblock Trump from getting states like California, Illinois, and Minnesota to clean up their voter rolls.

Attorney General Mike Hilgers, who initially gave Evnen the green light to submit the voter information to the DOJ, subsequently advised him to withhold it until the lawsuit is resolved. Evnen is confident the issue will be settled quickly.

“Once that hold is off, because the attorney general’s very confident that they’re going to prevail in this lawsuit, I will get back to that [DOJ] lawyer and ask her for the letter detailing how this information will be used,” Evnen said. “She’ll send me the letter, I’ll send her the information, and we’ll all go on with our lives.”

Proactive search of the voter rolls

Evnen is not waiting for the lawsuit or DOJ review to move forward on cleaning up Nebraska’s voter rolls. One provision in Trump’s executive order facilitates access to federal databases — notably the SAVE database, a combination of six databases that includes the Social Security death list — to confirm citizenship for the 2–3% of Nebraska’s 1.25 million registered voters not verified through DMV records. If non-citizens are identified, federal law prevents immediate removal from the voter rolls, but Evnen said he will refer cases to the Attorney General for potential prosecution.

“I don’t think we have very many people on our voter rolls who are not citizens,” Evnen said. “I think it’s a very small number. But why guess? Why should we have any?”