Trump administration quietly seeks to build national voter roll

Washington -- The Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Donald Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of immigrants in the country without authorization have voted illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort to essentially establish a national voting database, involving more than 30 states, has elicited serious concerns among voting rights experts because it is led by allies of the president, who as recently as January refused to acknowledge Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. It has also raised worries that those same officials could use the data to revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results.

The initiative has proceeded along two tracks, one at the Justice Department's civil rights division and another at its criminal division, seeking data about individual voters across the country, including names and addresses, in a move that experts say may violate the law. It is a significant break from decades of practice by Republican and Democratic administrations, which believed that doing so was federal overreach and ripe for abuse.

"Nobody has ever done anything like this," said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University's law school and a former Justice Department official.

The Justice Department has requested data from at least 16 Republican-controlled states, including Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. It has also sent more formal demands for data to at least 17 mostly Democrat-controlled or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and New York.

Nearly every state has resisted turning over voter files with private, personally identifiable information on voters such as driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers. Last week, a local judge blocked South Carolina from releasing private voter information to the Justice Department.

In a private meeting with the staff of top state election officials last month, Michael Gates, a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, disclosed that all 50 states would eventually receive similar requests, according to notes of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. In particular, he said, the federal government wants the last four digits of every voter's Social Security number.

The administration plans to compare that voter data to a different database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, to see how many registered voters on the state lists match up with noncitizens listed by immigration agents, according to people familiar with the matter.

Justin R. Erickson, the general counsel for Minnesota's secretary of state, raised fears that the data would be used to further the administration's own priorities. In a letter last month to the Justice Department, he wrote, "Equally concerning is the possibility that the DOJ will use the data inappropriately and the fact that the DOJ does not appear to have complied with the necessary legal requirements to obtain or use data on several million people."

Studies and state audits have found that noncitizen voting is essentially nonexistent.

Levitt likened the effort to sending federal troops to bolster local police work. "It's wading in, without authorization and against the law, with an overly heavy federal hand to take over a function that states are actually doing just fine," he said, adding that "it's wildly illegal, deeply troubling, and nobody asked for this."

In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson, Gates McGavick, said, "Enforcing the nation's elections laws is a priority in this administration and in the civil rights division."

He cited long-standing voting laws like the National Voter Registration Act and the Civil Rights Act, saying it gave the department leeway to obtain the data. Doing so will "ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections," McGavick added.

Already, the Justice Department has made extraordinary moves in the name of election integrity. It has unsuccessfully sought access to voting machines in Missouri and weighed the possibility of pursuing criminal investigations of state election officials over how they have done their jobs.

A memo from the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities obtained by the Times detailed the request by the Justice Department to scrutinize equipment used in the 2020 election.

The memo states that "Missouri is now part of a multistate attempt by the Department of Justice to access, physically inspect and perhaps take physical custody of election equipment used in the 2020 November general election." At least two counties in the state received a request from Andrew McCoy Warner, a Justice Department official.

The Missouri Independent earlier reported the requests for machines.

Employees at the agency have been clear that they are interested in a central, federal database of voter information. In a letter to multiple states, Scott Laragy and Paul Hayden, two prosecutors from the criminal division, asked to "discuss a potential information-sharing agreement" that would help the department investigate election fraud.

"With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce federal election laws and protect the integrity of federal elections," the lawyers wrote to election officials in Connecticut, according to records obtained by the Times. Multiple states, including Georgia and Nevada, received similar requests.

While the department has sought to gather all the data itself, Trump administration officials have also offered some states a slightly different option. In conversations with at least two states, prosecutors from the civil rights division asked election officials to simply run their entire voter list through the federal database for citizenship records, known as the SAVE database, that is housed by the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS officials have also contacted election officials with a similar request, according to records obtained by the Times. North Carolina received a letter inviting it to the "soft launch" of a new functionality of the database using the last four digits of a Social Security number.

Levitt said requests by the Justice Department for states to explain how they maintain voter lists were aboveboard. But what officials are demanding from many states goes so far beyond that, he said, that the moves may violate the Privacy Act, a post-Watergate law that carries criminal penalties and forbids the federal government from gathering certain types of information about citizens without stating beforehand the purpose of the data collection.

When Gates, a top lawyer in the civil rights division, met with the staff of top state election officials, he said the purpose of collecting the data was to conduct tests and analysis to ensure total compliance with federal laws. He did not specify the type of test or analysis, though acknowledged that officials would be receptive to sharing more detail in conferring with individual states.

Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, voiced unease in a statement responding to Justice Department requests. "Arizona voters deserve to participate in elections without fear that their personal information will be collected and stored in federal systems without proper legal safeguards or transparency," he wrote, adding that the demands "raise serious legal and constitutional concerns."

Outside voting rights and good governance organizations expressed alarm that the moves signaled an overarching scheme by the Trump administration to interfere in the midterm elections.

"The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome," said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Election officials also note that creating a federal database has its own complications. A state's voter file is not a static document; new voter registrations, changes in address, deaths and other adjustments to voter rolls take place every day. A federal database would be out of date a day after any voter list was turned over to federal officials.

Even as states are mostly responsible for overseeing voter rolls, the executive branch has tried in the past to do so, most notably during the first Trump administration.

After the 2016 election, Trump created a commission charged with rooting out voter fraud, putting Kris Kobach, then the secretary of state in Kansas, in charge. But Kobach's requests for sensitive voter information were nearly universally denied by election officials, and Trump abruptly shut down the commission in 2018.

This March, Trump, who has falsely claimed his 2020 election defeat was the result of fraud, issued an executive order intended to force states to more aggressively examine its voter rolls.

The order suggests that any states that fail to comply could face lawsuits, or lose federal funding.

But almost every election official has steadfastly refused to hand over private data.

"Nowhere does the Constitution provide the president or the executive branch with any independent power to control or otherwise conscript states to carry out nonstatutory policy priorities of the president," Shirley Weber, the Democratic secretary of state in California, wrote to the department in August, adding, "My office is not obligated to follow along."

Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, wrote that the department's requests "represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government's role in our country's electoral process." Schmidt, like the leaders of other states, offered the Justice Department publicly available voter files, but denied the request for more sensitive, private information from voters.

Election experts and officials worry what else the Trump administration may try to do with the data. The Department of Government Efficiency tried to cross-reference various giant government data sets to accomplish a number of policy goals, including reviving false claims of extensive voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

At her confirmation hearing to become attorney general in January, Pam Bondi said she accepted "the result" of the 2020 election, but in the next breath suggested there were major problems with the vote.

"I saw many things" in Pennsylvania, she said. She had gone to Pennsylvania after the election to amplify misleading claims of mass voter fraud, including helping arrange a news conference at a Philadelphia-area business, Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Around that time, she told Fox News that "we know that ballots have been dumped," and that she had heard "people were receiving ballots that were dead."

In less than a year of the new administration, Levitt said, the Justice Department has burned so much of its credibility with the public and the courts that any of its findings under Bondi based on the voter roll data were unlikely to be persuasive.

"Ask how many people are satisfied with what the Justice Department has done on the Jeffrey Epstein files," he said. "It's not just among liberals that they have lost credibility."