SC to send voters’ private data to federal government. How will it be used?
South Carolina’s election agency will share millions of voters’ personal information with the U.S. Department of Justice, ending a monthslong dealmaking process with the Trump administration.
The Election Commission, led by chair Robert Bolchoz, agreed to send its rolls, including partial Social Security numbers of registered voters, to the Justice Department on Tuesday. The sensitive information will likely be sent in the next 72 hours, new executive director Conway Belangia said.
The agreement requires South Carolinians’ partial Social Security numbers to be sent as hashes, which keeps the digits hidden, Belangia said.
“That’s about as secure as we can possibly make it at this point and protects that information of South Carolina voters,” Belangia told reporters.
The agreement allows the Department of Justice to review South Carolina’s voter rolls and look for “ineligible or non-citizen individuals” registered voters, according to a news release from the state Election Commission.
South Carolina’s election agency would have the final say over whether an identified individual would be removed from the voter rolls, Belangia told reporters.
“We would prefer to make those determinations based on our own research here, to remove somebody from the rolls,” Belangia said. “[We’d] much rather have a mistake made before somebody comes off the roll than to remove them and have them show up at a polling place and say, ‘Where’s my name?’ and they are qualified.”
It was a 4-1 vote Tuesday, with commissioner Joanne Day opposing a resolution to send the voter rolls. Day told reporters she had constitutional concerns.
The Trump administration requested South Carolina’s voter rolls over the summer, prompting months of negotiations with federal officials and a state lawsuit. The DOJ also requested voter rolls of nearly every other state, and over half were sued for not providing the sensitive data to the Trump administration.
Under South Carolina’s deal, a list with information about every voter in the state, including their partial Social Security numbers, will be sent to the DOJ. South Carolina has well over 3.3 million registered voters, including more than 440,000 in Richland and Lexington counties.
Voter privacy has been front and center in debates over whether South Carolina should send its data to the federal government. In January, Gov. Henry McMaster, who supported sending rolls, urged privacy in negotiations.
Last August, Calhoun County voter Anne Crook filed suit in state court, arguing the data transfer would violate her constitutional right to privacy in South Carolina. Judge Diane S. Goodstein granted a temporary injunction to keep voter data in the state, but the state Supreme overturned the pause in early September. Judge Daniel Coble of Richland County denied another request for a temporary injunction in October, leaving the Election Commission open to sharing its data.
Other plans for how the Trump administration plans to use the voter information bled out in lawsuits between states that denied the request and the DOJ. A Justice Department attorney said they plan to share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security to check citizenship in federal court in Rhode Island last month.
South Carolina’s agreement prevents the Justice Department from sharing voter registration information without permission with other federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Belangia said.
Following an initial confirmation hearing, Belangia told reporters trust in elections should be built at a local level.
“Let’s not get into somebody from higher up trying to influence,” Belangia said earlier this month. “Because lots of time, when the federal government gets involved, there are other agendas involved. All we want to do is conduct good, clean elections and have people elected in fair elections.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated
This story was originally published April 28, 2026 at 4:02 PM.