Trump DOJ Sues to Force States to Share Confidential Voter Data

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

As the nation staggers toward the 2026 round of midterm elections, the threats to the integrity of U.S. democracy — already a veritable hailstorm of partisan contention — have escalated dramatically under the second Trump administration, attaining something like hurricane force. Owing to the fevered narratives proliferating across right-wing media, many have come to believe that the nation faces a scourge of “illegal” voting and wide-scale fraud. But this misdirection, shrill as it is with racist dog-whistles, is itself a fraud perpetrated against democratic rights. The right-wing battle for voter suppression, long waged primarily at the state level, is now being perpetrated by the federal government and the Department of Justice (DOJ) itself.

The Trump administration has proven it will go to extreme lengths, however sinister or farcical, to flatter its leader, reward its cronies, and improve its position through bullying and force. By installing sympathizers, firing expert federal overseers, eradicating the DOJ’s checks on power, and even criminally investigating critics among Trump’s own officials, the second Trump administration has been able to turn the DOJ to its own ends. Such ends now include a federally led effort to wrest control of confidential voter roll data away from the states by combative legal means.

An illustrative example of this democratic subversion has recently issued from the state of Minnesota — which, thanks to a vicious, punitive invasion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, has gone from an electoral battleground state into a rather too literal battleground, with two deaths so far at the hands of federal agents. But hearteningly, a huge swath of the population has been galvanized by these tragedies, and by ICE’s systematic abuse of immigrants, to resist the authoritarian crackdown. This groundswell of public outrage, organizing, and protest against racist state violence has been cause for reinvigorated hopes.

But the attacks on immigrants and protesters on Minnesota’s streets have been paired with high-level legal assaults — like a dubious DOJ investigation of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Alongside the more visible struggles, the DOJ has repeatedly attempted, as reiterated in a letter by Attorney General Pam Bondi, to force Minnesota (and, in fact, all 49 other states) to open confidential voter rolls to federal scrutiny. Bondi’s recent letter, outlining steps to “bring back law and order,” repeated a demand that the administration has already been pressing in the courts. So far, Minnesota and several other blue states have refused the request.

Constitutionally, the federal government takes no role in elections; they are overseen solely by states. Why might the federal DOJ take such a sudden interest in obtaining state voter data? It’s clear that Trump’s ultimate aim is to distort democracy, tilting elections through mass disenfranchisement. One way to suppress the vote and cheat an election is to purge opponents’ voters from the rolls. Such purges are calculated to target (by de facto outcomes, if not explicitly) people of color and low-income voters — i.e., those likely to vote against the right. Seizing state rolls will facilitate such purges to an extent previously unreached. It is a bitterly ironic reversal that the department that was supposedly the vaunted federal guardian of democratic rights has now been pitted against them. As many experts have attested, the Trump DOJ’s nationwide legal assault poses a grave threat to the U.S.’s already-tattered electoral institutions.

Fraudulent Fraud

The DOJ’s courtroom efforts to obtain voter rolls — which include addresses, Social Security numbers, and other private data — have grown from scattered early attempts to now include all 50 states. As ProPublica reported in 2017, the tactic had been trialed by the first Trump administration, which that year requested data from every state. But this legal fusillade is another matter; far surpassing past scattered challenges.

This wide-scale legal assault, as The New York Times described it in September, “has proceeded along two tracks, one at the Justice Department’s civil rights division and another at its criminal division” — a full mobilization. Again, the Constitution mandates that election administration is the purview of states. Federal control of voter roll data is not only without historical precedent; it would also likely represent a massive breach of privacy law and disclosure obligations.

Truthout reached out to Voting Rights Lab, a policy analysis think tank staffed by election experts. The Lab’s co-founder and CEO Samantha Tarazi commented, “These efforts make it clear President Trump is preparing to use the power of his office to interfere in the 2026 election. What started as an unconstitutional executive order — marching orders for state action regardless of its fate in court — has grown into a full federal mobilization to seize power over our elections,” placing “enormous pressure” on democratic systems.

Another leading civil rights watchdog, the Brennan Center for Justice, has been tracking the ongoing legal battles. As of this writing, 24 states, along with Washington, D.C., are being sued in an attempt to force sharing of confidential data; not coincidentally, almost all are blue and/or battleground states. In Nebraska and South Carolina, voters themselves “have filed cases in state court to prevent election officials from sharing their private voter information,” the Brennan Center noted. Such widespread refusals have set the stage for a series of pitched legal battles.

Meanwhile, some states have complied willingly. In December, Stateline covered how the DOJ presented 11 Republican-led states (which are, of course, more likely to comply) with a confidential proposal: a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would give the federal government the power to review roll data and purge voters at will. Officials in 11 states — Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia — have expressed interest; Colorado and Wisconsin rejected the offer. (Both, of course, were then sued.) And four states, all Republican-led (Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Wyoming) “complied voluntarily” with the Justice Department’s demand, seemingly happy to do so; still, given the Trump administration’s vindictive nature, other pressures may have been in play.

A certain rate of voter roll “purging” is normal in order to account for voters who die or move out of state. But during the Biden administration, right-wing groups pushed states to subject their voter rolls to nakedly partisan “purges” far beyond the norm, all in the name of combating purported “voter fraud,” as Truthout has previously reported. Now, it seems, the Trump administration hopes analogous anti-democratic schemes can be replicated at the federal level, under the DOJ’s auspices. Actual voter fraud by individual citizens, it must be reiterated, is so vanishingly rare that it is, in effect, nonexistent; the tiny handful of cases are an utterly negligible factor in U.S. elections. The only real threat to U.S. elections is issuing from the right — and lately from the top as well.

Ashiya Brown is a former election security specialist for the Michigan secretary of state, where she worked alongside federal election overseers. She is now the state director of the Michigan branch of All Voting is Local — a national non-partisan voting rights organization that works to improve ballot access. All Voting, as it’s known, pursues civic education while advocating against issues like gerrymandering and the many imposed hurdles to voting that lead to disenfranchisement. In an op-ed in The Hill, Brown outlined the risks of imperiling electoral cybersecurity.

Speaking to Truthout, Brown said, “We see [the lawsuits] as an overall plan to weaponize the Department of Justice in a manner to disenfranchise voters … This is very strategic.” She points out that not only are key battleground states among those sued, but there’s also a correlation with the states in which Trump acolytes had created slates of “fake electors” in a foully corrupt attempt to steal the 2020 election.

“I do believe that these DOJ lawsuits are an abuse of power. Very much so. They are seeking to weaponize sensitive voter data at the expense of our free and fair elections,” Brown went on. “What they’re attempting to do is simply to purge the rolls … We’re really seeing this as a push to get oversight of our state elections — which we don’t need. Elections are state-level for a reason.”

“I believe it’s all part of a bigger picture,” she added, referring to the Trump administration’s larger push to gain federal control over elections.

Moreover, in addition to the top-down DOJ pressures, another significant threat exists in the network of smaller local facilitators and collaborators. Brown said that “people with positions of power over elections” — like Trump-sympathizing electoral officials — “those are the individuals we worry about. The ones [in states] who agreed to this, most of them are working with the current administration.”

The modern multitude of voter-suppression campaigns and legislation — voter ID requirements and citizenship tests, roll purges, and imposed obstacles like limiting mail-in and early voting — evinces a clear motive. “In my opinion, it leads back to voters of color. We have these documentary proof-of-citizenship bills being pushed — in Michigan alone, this would disenfranchise 700,000 voters,” Brown pointed out. “Married women, whose last names don’t match their IDs. Individuals with low economic status, who can’t purchase” a birth certificate or ID. “That burden falls on a specific, disenfranchised group of people: mostly people of color, and newer citizens as well.”

The Purge Goes National

One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database. (In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.) A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.

An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used “to further promote false claims about election fraud, target political opponents, or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,” in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.

With highly suspicious timing, the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, tool. Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits, it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.

That may well have consequences beyond elections — there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention, including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries. The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS. (Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration in a very similar way, incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)

Department of Injustice

Lawsuits are still in preliminary stages, and it’s not yet clear how courtroom battles might play out. (For what it’s worth, the Trump administration continues to prove as incompetent as it is malevolent; evidently, its lawsuits have been misfiled and bungled at every turn.) In the meantime, Democratic state officials in states that have been sued by the DOJ have replied with a strongly worded letter requesting more information. This might sound a bit limp as far as resistance goes, but it does signify the widespread state refusals that have been vocally backed by lawmakers; the 10 secretaries of state who signed the joint letter also used it to criticize contradictory statements by the Trump DOJ and DHS. (And even some red states have so far refused to share data.)

Anticipating worse still to come, All Voting is working nationwide to educate the public about the administration’s real intentions and assert the facts of these complex situations. “A lot of this administration’s work is to confuse us,” Brown noted. The organization is also taking proactive measures to aid communities in real, meaningful ways; for instance, Brown cited a direct-aid campaign in the Detroit area that covered costs for locals’ ID renewals and replacements, in the event that strict proof-of-citizenship laws do arrive.

“This abuse of power from the current administration is another example of their election lies and the ways that they undermine trust in the voting process,” Brown said. “It puts Americans’ privacy at risk — it is another overstep from an administration that we’ve seen overstep a lot.”

“They’re overstepping their authority without being clear about their plans. But their plans are already in a book, and it’s called Project 2025,” she said with a bitter laugh. “We cannot allow it … We all need to keep this in mind. We’re trying to ring the alarm and let people know how their voices can be heard.”