Alarm as Trump DoJ pushes for voter information on millions of Americans

The justice department is undertaking an unprecedented effort to collect sensitive voter information about tens of millions of Americans, a push that relies on thin legal reasoning and which could be aimed at sowing doubt about the midterm election results this year.

The department has asked at least 43 states for their comprehensive information on voters, including the last four digits of their social security numbers, full dates of birth and addresses, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eight states have voluntarily turned over the information, according to the Brennan Center, and the department has sued 23 states and the District of Columbia for the information.

Many of the states have faced lawsuits after refusing to turn over the information, citing state privacy laws. Some of the states have provided the justice department with voter lists that have sensitive personal information redacted, only to find themselves sued by the department. Nearly every state the justice department has sued is led by Democratic election officials.

“Our position on this starts and ends with the law. We looked at state law and federal law regarding disclosure of this very sensitive personal information on millions of people, and what we discovered, or at least the way we’ve concluded, is that the law protects voters from this kind of disclosure under these circumstances,” said Steve Simon, a Democrat who is the top election official in Minnesota, one of the states being sued.

Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, another state being sued, was more blunt. “Pound sand,” he posted on X in response to a justice department official who announced the department was suing his state.

The justice department has not said what exactly it intends to do with the sensitive information, beyond a general effort to ensure states are making sure only eligible voters are on the rolls. There is no national database of voters in the United States, and both the constitution and federal law gives the states, not the federal government, the authority to screen their voter rolls. A 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), requires states to make a “reasonable effort” to keep ineligible voters off their rolls, but gives states leeway on how to do so.

“The federal government does not have the right to collect information on hundreds of millions of American voters unless Congress has authorized it. It has not,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an expert in policies dealing with monitoring voter rolls. “This appears to be more focused on amplifying false narratives about problems with our election system and preparation for elections that candidates aligned with the president might lose.”

The department’s efforts amount to a push by the federal government to take over the power of policing voter rolls, said Sejal Jhaveri, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit organization challenging the department’s efforts to obtain voter registration records in some states.

“Once they get into the role of determining who belongs on a voter roll and who doesn’t, that obviously has the ability to affect elections,” she said.

A justice department spokesperson said the agency had the authority to request the rolls and “responsive data is being screened for ineligible voter entries”. The spokesperson did not say how the data was being reviewed.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections. The DoJ civil rights division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.

The justice department is sharing voter information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the news outlet Stateline reported in September. The sharing comes as DHS has expanded the functionality of a database, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (Save), that allows officials to check someone’s citizenship status. Until recently, if someone wanted to use the database, they needed someone’s alien number – a unique number the Department of Homeland Security assigns to non-citizens – and could only search one by one. Now, the database can query immigration status if they have the last four digits of someone’s social security number.

But matching up voter records with the sprawling Save database can lead to errors, Becker warned.

“It is hard to take a record for David Becker or Sam Levine on one list and that on another list and say for sure it’s the same person,” he said. “We already know that the comparison of voter lists with the Save system is leading to very high error rates.”

The DHS has run nearly 50m voter registrations through the database and referred about 10,000 people for further investigation, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. That means about 0.02% of those screened are potential non-citizens.

Voter fraud – including voting by non-citizens – is extremely rare. While there are isolated examples of non-citizens getting registered because of confusion or bureaucratic mistakes, there also have been documented instances in which states have falsely accused people of being non-citizens ineligible to vote. Someone may register to vote after getting naturalized, for example, and databases may not capture the change.

Some states have already voluntarily uploaded data to the Save database and the results so far have not indicated widespread fraud. In Texas, where there are more than 18.2 million registered voters, officials ran the full voter file through Save and uncovered 2,724 potential non-citizens last fall. At least some of those flagged turned out to actually be citizens, NPR reported last year. In Denton county, north of Dallas, the Save database flagged 84 people as potential non-citizens, but 14 people proved they actually were citizens, said Frank Phillips, the county’s election administrator. Phillips said he was unsure how those people had been wrongly flagged.

Alabama election officials recently announced they removed 186 people from the voter rolls – 25 of whom voted - after running data through Save, a tiny fraction of the state’s more than 3.8 million registered voters. In Tennessee, where there are about 4 million registered voters, officials used Save to identify 42 potential non-citizen voters. Louisiana officials identified 390 potential ineligible voters in the state (there are about 2.9 million registered voters).

The justice department has also offered states the opportunity to voluntarily enter into an agreement to share its voter rolls. One proposed agreement, obtained by the Guardian, says that the justice department will provide an “analysis and assessment” of a state’s voter file and notify state officials “of any voter list maintenance issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns”. It then requires states to remove any ineligible voters flagged by the justice department within 45 days of the department flagging them.

Such an agreement would probably violate the NVRA, the Democratic National Committee wrote to 10 states earlier this month. The law sets out a clear process with safeguards for removing voters and prohibits systematic removals within 90 days of a federal election. Dhillon responded to the legal letters by suggesting the DNC was interfering in a federal investigation and encouraging the obstruction of justice.

“Assistant Attorney General Dhillon seems to have mistaken a letter identifying potential violations of the National Voter Registration Act for obstruction of justice. The DNC will never back down from a fight to protect voting rights, and we look forward to meeting the justice department in federal court,” Dan Freeman, the litigation director at the DNC, said in a statement.

Ten secretaries of state sent a letter to the justice department in November asking for clarification on how the department would use the data and whether it intended to share it with the DHS. The department never responded.

The justice department has argued in court filings it needs the records to ensure states are complying with the NVRA and a 2002 law that requires states to collect certain identifying information when someone registers. More recently, the justice department has argued it is entitled to the voter roll information under provisions in the 1960 Civil Rights Act. Those provisions require election officials to preserve election materials for 22 months after a federal election and require them to turn them over to the justice department once they make a written request stating their basis and purpose for the records. The law was used during the civil rights movement to ensure that registrars across the south were registering Black voters.

But the justice department has not yet articulated a basis for needing the records, said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has worked on voting rights issues at the justice department and the White House.

“It has acknowledged a purpose. And that purpose is: we’re investigating the rolls and we want to make sure your rolls are clean,” said Levitt, who was among several former justice department officials who signed on to an amicus brief opposing the justice department’s efforts to get information on California voters. “They have, to my knowledge, literally never articulated a basis for the request. The statute requires both.”

A 1974 law, the Privacy Act, also requires the government to inform the public when it collects their information in bulk, disclose how it intends to use it, and to allow for public comment. The justice department has not taken those steps in this instance, experts said.

“The DoJ, despite being begged for an answer to that, has just refused to file this. And it’s a fairly simple procedure,” Becker said. “The only thing I can come up with is that if they were to be honest and transparent and answer all of those questions, it would reveal the problems of what they’re trying to do.”

During the first Trump administration, a short-lived White House panel also tried to request sensitive voter information from all 50 states but was met with swift bipartisan push back. Mississippi’s top election official, a Republican, famously said the commission could “jump in the Gulf of Mexico”. The panel dissolved amid infighting as it sought the records.