New lawsuit challenges Trump’s ‘unlawful’ acquisition of Americans’ voter records, demands data’s deletion

Three voting and privacy rights organizations asked a federal court Thursday to declare the Trump administration’s “secretive and unlawful effort” to collect millions of Americans’ voter records illegal under federal privacy laws.

In the new lawsuit, the groups also requested that the court order the federal government to delete the data it’s collected so far.

The groups — the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens — alleged that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the past year and a half has illegally obtained voter records from at least 47 states as part of a sweeping effort to investigate unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

“DHS has no authority to stockpile voter data for a nationwide election-law dragnet, and in carrying out this policy it has disregarded federal safeguards and violated the privacy rights of millions of Americans,” the organizations said.

Since last year, DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have worked to obtain state voter registration records. Some states complied with the Trump administration’s demands and gave the federal government their unredacted voter rolls, which may include people’s sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers.

But the DOJ also sued 30 states and D.C. for their voter rolls, and DHS has sought to obtain records in multiple other ways.

The three civic organizations said DHS abused its legal authority throughout the voter data initiative.

“Congress created DHS to prevent terrorism, secure the border, and address other specified threats — not to conduct a voter-fraud dragnet centered on the private voting information of millions of Americans and records reflecting the exercise of constitutional rights essential to democracy,” they said.

The legal nonprofit Democracy Forward* is representing the organizations in the suit.

The new lawsuit comes just days after a federal judge in D.C. found the DOJ’s crusade for state rolls illegal. Specifically, the judge said the effort amounted to an “attempt to decide who gets to vote.”

Internal government documents released last week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward revealed that DHS — specifically U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — received 50.6 million voter records from the DOJ.

ICE received another 48.4 million voter records from “independent sources of information” connected to Heather Honey, a longtime promoter of false election conspiracy theories who is now a senior DHS official.

The full scope of what DHS has done with the voter records it received from the DOJ and other sources remains unclear.

Legal proceedings in other cases have revealed that the Trump administration sent millions of records through a flawed DHS citizenship-status database as part of its hunt for noncitizens registered to vote. However, due to flaws in federal data, that database has routinely flagged eligible voters — particularly naturalized citizens — as noncitizens. 

Separately, DHS has used immigration data in its possession and citizenship data from other federal agencies to conduct massive reviews of public versions of state registration lists.

This week, the DOJ used what it said were findings from DHS’s audit of California’s public voter roll to challenge around 20,000 people’s right to vote in the upcoming midterms. 

In a lawsuit against the state Thursday, the DOJ claimed that DHS flagged those voters as potential noncitizens and asked a federal court to force the state and Los Angeles County to set aside those ballots until their citizenship status is confirmed. 

Falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote is a federal crime. But the DOJ has not charged any of the 20,000 people it claimed were illegally registered in the state. Though the department asked a federal court to disenfranchise those 20,000 voters, it asserted it was “not practicable or feasible” to investigate all 20,000 for potentially committing a crime.

*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.

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