A copy of an agreement provided to NPR by the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles shows the DMV formally agreed this month to transfer data about state driver’s license and state ID cardholders from 2018 through March 2020.
The Census Bureau’s public information office has not responded to NPR’s question about whether it is currently in discussions with any other states about data-sharing agreements.
In addition to allowing states to redistrict using the number of citizens old enough to vote, Trump’s executive order noted that the citizenship data could assist the government in generating a “more reliable count of the unauthorized alien population in the country.”
The arrangements with South Carolina, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska are not expected to involve information about unauthorized immigrants. All four states require applicants for driver’s licenses and state ID cards to provide proof that they are legally residing in the country.
Some states have publicly refused to hand over data.
New Hampshire and Pennsylvania were among the states that received requests from the bureau. But the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation sent a letter to the bureau in October denying the request, Alexis Campbell, a spokesperson for the department, tells NPR. New Hampshire Department of Safety spokesperson Paul Raymond Jr. says in an email that state law “prohibits the DMV from fulfilling the request.”
The Iowa Department of Transportation and South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles did not immediately respond on Wednesday to NPR’s questions about why they decided to share information from their records.
Asked why the South Dakota Department of Public Safety decided to enter into its data-sharing agreement with the bureau, spokesperson Tony Mangan replied by email: “South Dakota’s Driver Licensing program is authorized to share information for use by any government agency in carrying out its functions. Information was provided at the request of the U.S. Census Bureau to carry out its function.”
“All data that the state program agency agrees to provide the Census Bureau remains confidential,” South Dakota’s agreement says, later specifying that the bureau can only use the information for “statistical purposes and not for program or administrative enforcement.”
South Dakota has agreed to deliver monthly data about license and ID cardholders’ citizenship status going back to 2018 and through the end of 2021.
Unlike in the agreement signed with the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles, the bureau does not ask South Dakota’s driver licensing program for data about race. But it does request names, addresses, dates of birth, sex and eye color.
The bureau’s researchers are relying on those details to help them match different government records about the same individual and try to come up with the most up-to-date citizenship status of every adult in the country. The Trump administration is counting on these efforts to produce anonymized citizenship data that are detailed down to the level of a census block.
Using that kind of information to exclude U.S. citizens under 18 and noncitizens — both those lawfully and unlawfully in the country — when redrawing districts would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” a GOP redistricting strategist concluded.
It is an open question whether redrawing voting maps based on the number of citizens old enough to vote instead of all residents, including children, is legal. That issue may be tested in the courts as early as next year, when the Census Bureau plans to release block-level citizenship data to the states by July 31, 2021, James Whitehorne, the head of the Census Bureau’s redistricting and voting rights data office, confirmed in April.
Many voting rights advocates, however, are skeptical about the accuracy of data that would be generated from historical records that often contain out-of-date information, especially about whether a person is currently a U.S. citizen.
Attorneys with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC are representing Latinx community groups in Arizona and Texas in an ongoing federal lawsuit to try to stop the administration from releasing this kind of citizenship data. They’re arguing the administration is trying to prevent Latinos, noncitizens and other immigrants from receiving their fair share in political representation.
Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate have introduced numerous bills to try to stop the Trump administration from producing the citizenship data.
Last week, the House Appropriations Committee released a funding bill for the Census Bureau that would prevent those efforts from receiving new federal funds.
