A former Illinois GOP House candidate is urging the U.S. Department of Education to investigate Midwestern colleges in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois for allegedly sharing student data with groups boosting left-wing voter efforts.
Desi Anderson, who lost to state Rep. Sharon Chung, D-Bloomington, in the November 2024 election, ran in a district with four colleges in it.
“I legally cannot have access to [date of births] of students. I cannot get their mailing address. All that is protected under the federal law under [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act]. So it makes it very challenging when you run in a district where you have a ton of college students to make voter contact,” Anderson told The Center Square. “So what the Democrats did was they used [non-government organizations] to funnel that data, because it’s against the law for a campaign to have access to it, or any other individual. No third-party vendor can get access to that data. It’s protected just like a medical record is protected.”
Anderson filed a complaint with the DOE that demands that the federal agency enforce the FERPA and immediately act against known violations tied to the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Anderson said ALL IN is a sister organization of the larger Civic Nation, a non-profit launched by former President Barack Obama.
“This is a nationwide issue. You’ve got over 1,000 universities and colleges nationwide that engage with ALL IN. In Illinois alone, you have 44 of them participating. So it’s been happening since 2016,” said Anderson. “Their end game is winning elections at any cost. And it’s weaponizing student data, and students have no idea that their voting behavior is being tracked. Without proper consent, their data is used for election strategies. They didn’t sign up for any of that.”
Illinois U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Peoria, urged the U.S. Department of Education to investigate these claims.
“Universities in Illinois and across the nation should not be sharing student’s private data without their consent. Now it has been reported that universities have done so to help left-leaning organizations target and turnout students to vote for Democratic candidates,” said LaHood.
The legal filing alleges that universities participating in the ALL IN Democracy Challenge should face the immediate termination of all federal funding, unless they cease participation.
On their website, ALL IN says it “empowers colleges and universities to achieve excellence in nonpartisan student democratic engagement.”
Anderson said there’s a relationship between ALL IN and two other nonprofits called: the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University and the National Student Clearinghouse.
In her complaint, Anderson argued that the NSLVE organization forces schools to share FERPA-protected data, which is then passed through the NSC and distributed to third-party voter processing firms.
“They’re taking student enrollment and cross-referencing it to voter rolls and targeting students whether or not they need to get out and vote,” said Anderson.
Illinois State University was named a 2024 ALL IN Most Engaged Campus for college student voting by the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.
“Then the question is, if that student is enrolled in the fall and they decide to transfer out of Illinois State University and attend private college in the spring where they don’t participate in this program, how long do these NGOs sit on this data of this student? Who has the chain of custody of the data? What happens to the data after that?” said Anderson.
In a news release, Braiden Gonzalez, current student at Illinois State University, said he was shocked to learn that his personal student data was shared without his explicit consent for voter engagement efforts.
“I trusted my university to protect my enrollment information, not to hand it over to third-party organizations like the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE),” said Gonzalez.
