Legal Complaint Asks Education Department To Probe Alleged Left-Wing GOTV Scheme At Colleges
A former Illinois GOP House candidate filed a legal complaint on Thursday requesting the Education Department investigate several Midwestern colleges for allegedly sharing protected student data with third parties working to boost left-wing get-out-the-vote efforts on university campuses.
Brought by Republican Desi Anderson, who unsuccessfully ran for state House in the 2024 election, the complaint contains claims that numerous universities across Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have unlawfully violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) by using “students’ FERPA-protected data to make and implement student voter registration drives (VRD) and student get-out-the-vote campaigns (GOTV).”
According to the Department of Education, FERPA “affords parents the right to have access to their children’s education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information from the education records.” Such rights are transferred to the student once he or she turns 18 or “enters a postsecondary institution at any age.”
Information protected under the federal statute includes a student’s name, address, and date of birth, according to the agency.
The schools listed in Anderson’s complaint are members of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.
As The Federalist previously reported, the ALL IN initiative is a project of Civic Nation, a nonprofit spearheaded by Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. While marketed as a “nonpartisan” enterprise, the venture has produced leftist talking points about commonsense election safeguards like voter ID requirements and is stacked with Democrat partisans.
Election integrity specialists have expressed concerns in recent years that GOTV operations like the ALL IN initiative could be used to boost turnout on college campuses among likely Democrat voters. During the 2022 midterms, for example, young voters (18-29) broke for Democrat candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, data shows. President Donald Trump significantly closed that margin in the 2024 election, however.
According to InfluneceWatch, colleges that join ALL IN “also join the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University,” which the watchdog noted “has data from 2012 on campus voter registration and turnout rates in national elections.” Upon receiving their designated NSLVE report, participating universities “share[] the report with the ALL IN Challenge to be considered for recognition.”
In her complaint, Anderson argued that NSLVE “compels institutions to hand over students’ FERPA-protected data.” She claimed this information “is then passed through” a student data-sharing organization known as the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and subsequently distributed to “third-party voter processing companies.”
“Without student consent, these companies match student information with voter databases, returning reports and lists of voters and non-voters to participating schools,” the complaint reads.
Among the “third-party voter processing companies” Anderson claims are participants in this purported “matching” are L2 and Catalist. The latter is a data firm that “services both left-of-center nonprofits and Democratic candidates and officeholders,” according to InfluenceWatch.
The Thursday complaint requests the Education Department to “investigate and demand voluntary FERPA compliance by stopping” colleges and universities from sharing “FERPA-protected student data with third parties to develop plans to increase student voter registration and student voting rates.” Should the schools fail to comply with FERPA, the filing asks the agency to “take legal action” against them.
“A plain reading of FERPA requires the U.S. Secretary of Education to intervene and prevent universities from unlawfully disclosing student records under the guise of voter engagement efforts,” Anderson’s attorney Erick Kaardal said in a statement. “If universities are providing student data for ballot harvesting, it is a clear violation of federal law, and the DoE has a duty to act immediately.”
The Education Department did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on whether it has received Anderson’s complaint or if it plans to investigate the allegations made in the filing.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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