The Trump administration is building a ‘national voter roll’, former DOJ lawyers warn

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is helping build a ‘national voter roll’ aimed at allowing the federal government to root out noncitizens, a group of former DOJ voting attorneys warned in a recent court filing opposing the agency’s demands for states’ unredacted voter registration information. 

Seventeen former Civil Rights Division lawyers submitted an amicus brief in the DOJ’s lawsuit against California — one of 22 the DOJ filed against states and Washington D.C. for refusing unrestrained access to voters’ private data. 

In those lawsuits, the DOJ asserts it needs voters’ social security numbers, driver license numbers and dates of birth to ensure state election officials are complying with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). But the former DOJ lawyers allege the current occupants of their old offices aren’t actually trying to enforce the NVRA — they’re doing the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) dirty work, helping them create a federal voter database.

“While DOJ has provided a purpose for its requests — enforcing the NVRA — that purpose appears to be a stalking horse for its true purpose: to create a national voter roll and enable the federal government to conduct its own list maintenance to discover whether noncitizens or undocumented immigrants are registered to vote,” the amici wrote.

“News reports and the Administration’s public statements have revealed that DOJ’s true purpose in seeking these voter files is not what DOJ stated in its information requests,” they continued. “Rather, that proffered purpose has been shown to be a pretext for other, undeclared aims, which appear to include creating DOJ’s own national voter database and then sharing that information with the [DHS] as part of a broader effort to discover what DOJ thinks are undocumented immigrants who are unlawfully voting.” 

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the DOJ has demanded state voter rolls ostensibly to ensure officials are properly maintaining them under the NVRA and the Help America Vote Act by removing out-of-date registrations, claiming broad authority under the 1960 Civil Rights Act (CRA) to inspect voter files. 

Under the CRA, before the DOJ can get access to registration records, it must first state in writing the “basis and purpose” for that request. But the DOJ never did that here, the amici argue, offering nothing to suggest that California officials have somehow violated their duty to make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters.”

“DOJ has not provided any basis at all for thinking that California might be violating federal statutes, much less a basis that would justify requesting sensitive voter data about all California voters,” the former DOJ attorneys wrote.

Given that the DOJ sent nearly identical demand letters to almost every state, it would have been difficult for agency lawyers to articulate a distinguishable basis for those requests in every state — especially those like Georgia, which have aggressively removed hundreds of thousands of registrations in recent years. 

The brief repeatedly points to statements made by federal officials to question the purported purpose of the data demands. 

“DHS has largely confirmed these reports, issuing a statement to media outlets explaining that the Administration’s plan to have DOJ and DHS share voter roll information is essential to ‘scrub aliens from voter rolls,’ and that DHS’s ‘collaboration’ with DOJ will ‘prevent illegal aliens’ from voting,” the amici noted. “Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has also stated that the federal government has ‘checked 47.5 million voter records’ — apparently through [the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program], a system with known accuracy issues — and that there are ‘several thousand noncitizens who are enrolled to vote in federal elections.’”

Under Trump, other federal agencies have worked with DHS to bolster its attempts to gather massive amounts of data related to citizenship. The Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service have shared files with DHS, the Department of Agriculture has ordered states to turn over data on food stamp recipients, and the Department of Health and Human Services have shared Medicaid administration files with DHS. Agency officials have also worked with private data brokers and contracted with tech firms to build the government’s mass surveillance capabilities relying on utility bills, credit reports, vehicle registrations and facial recognition technology.