Jacobsen subpoena produces more frustration than answers

Montana lawmakers trying to get to the bottom of what state voter information was shared with the federal government say they still have questions, despite a subpoenaed response from Montana’s secretary of state.

Legislators on the Interim State Administration and Veterans Affairs Committee had subpoenaed Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen for the subject headers of a Montana voter file Jacobsen’s office shared last year with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jacobsen’s staff responded Sept. 11 with a letter saying, “the subpoena was an unnecessary encroachment of the separation of powers that wasted taxpayer dollars, could have been avoided and lacked warranted scrutiny.”  

In a hand-delivered letter, Austin James, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, told lawmakers they could have gotten the information from other sources, including the Legislative Audit Committee, which questioned James about shared voter data last spring.

SAVA Committee Vice Chair Rep. Marc Lee, D-Butte, told Capitolized that he and Chair Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, met Monday with legislative attorneys who advised that although Jacobsen didn’t produce the subpoenaed information in the spreadsheet format legislators expected, the requested details were written into the response authored by James.

For some percentage of Montana voters, the data shared with the federal government included the last four digits of the voters’ Social Security numbers, which James said served as a substitute for a driver’s license number for voters who didn’t use a driver’s license to register to vote.

“You have to deduce it a little bit when you read the letter,” Lee said of locating the details responsive to the subpoena. “There’s like six or seven things in there that if you scrounge through the letter you can find.”

A U.S. Department of Justice demand in August 2025 for Montana voter records, complete with birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, is at the core of the legislators’ questions. On Sept. 14, that personally sensitive information became the subject of a federal government whistleblower report alleging that U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigators used the data to log into public-facing state websites to access individual voter histories.

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The whistleblower report became public when U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer, D-New York, and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-California, presented its findings to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and demanded a response by Sept. 21. 

The report was sourced to the Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit watchdog.

Neither Lee nor Manzella was familiar with the report before talking to Capitolized. Discussions in the legislative committee led by the two lawmakers hadn’t produced an answer to why the U.S. Department of Justice would want voters’ partial Social Security numbers. 

Manzella, at the committee’s Sept. 2 meeting, said the Social Security data was shared with the U.S. DOJ “for the obvious reason that Social Security numbers are issued by the federal government.”

Thursday, Manzella said the government needed the partial Social Security numbers to positively identify voters. Both Manzella and Jacobsen support President Donald Trump’s efforts to identify non-citizen voters. Trump, without verification, credits his 2020 presidential loss to non-citizen and deceased voters. In a July address to the nation, Trump claimed that thousands of noncitizens are registering to vote.

States have primary authority over elections under the U.S. Constitution. More than two dozen states have been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice after refusing to provide voter information, citing privacy rights and arguing that U.S. DOJ has no right to the data. Twenty-three of those cases have been dismissed by federal courts in favor of the states so far.

Manzella told her committee Sept. 2 that Jacobsen spared Montana from a lawsuit by cooperating with the U.S. DOJ. Jacobsen led her response to the subpoena this week by offering a truncated quote of Manzella:

“I have to respect our Secretary of State is wanting to stand and protect states’ rights. I know the [Trump] administration has sued states that have not complied with their requests and we have not been sued. … Our Secretary of State is doing her best to protect states’ rights and our citizen[s] thereof, and walking a fine line and honoring the federal laws…”

Manzella told Capitolized she will work in the Legislature to make it easier to prevent noncitizens from voting, an effort she worked on in 2025 with mixed results.

Committee member Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, said he will pursue stronger voter protection laws in the next legislative session to ensure that voters know if their information is being shared.

“Lawmakers set state election laws and the safety of voter information. So there definitely could be a privacy-protection law,” Kortum said. “We need to reaffirm that in the code to assure that Montanans know what’s happening with their information.”