People participate in a naturalization ceremony last year at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J. The Trump administration is encouraging states to use an online search tool to verify the citizenship of registered voters, alarming some Democrats and privacy experts. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

BILOXI, Miss. — The Trump administration is developing a powerful data tool it claims will let states identify noncitizens registered to vote. But Democratic critics and data experts warn it could allow the federal government to vacuum up vast quantities of information on Americans for unclear purposes.

Some Democratic election officials and opponents of the effort fear President Donald Trump wants to build a federal database of voters to target political opponents or cherry-pick rare examples of noncitizen voters to fuel a sense of crisis. Republican election officials allied with the president counter that he’s helping states to maintain accurate voter rolls.

The Trump administration has rolled out changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, tool at the same time the U.S. Department of Justice is asking states for copies of their voter rolls. The timing, combined with questions about what happens to voter data uploaded to the program, has alarmed critics.

Trump wants Congress to pass a national proof of citizenship voter registration requirement and in March tried to unilaterally impose one for federal elections through executive order. But with the legislation stalled and the order halted by the courts, the citizenship data tool may offer a backdoor way to accomplish the same goal.

SAVE was originally intended to help state and local officials verify the immigration status of individual noncitizens seeking government benefits. But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, this spring refashioned it into a platform that can scan states’ voter rolls if election officials upload the data.

Justice Department demand for state voter lists underscores their importance

The changes to SAVE, rolled out over just a few months and with little public debate, are “tinkering with sort of the bones of democracy,” said John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group that argues privacy is a fundamental right.

“You’re talking about the voting process and who will be eligible to vote,” Davisson said. “And to take a system that is not designed for use in that process and repurpose it, really on the fly, without a formal comment process, without formal rulemaking, without congressional intervention — that’s pretty anomalous and pretty alarming.”

Previously, SAVE could only search one name at a time. Now it can conduct bulk searches, allowing state officials to potentially feed into it information on millions of registered voters. SAVE checks that information against a series of federal databases and reports back whether it can verify someone’s immigration status.

Since May, it also can draw upon Social Security data, transforming the program into a tool that can confirm citizenship because Social Security records for many, but not all, Americans include the information. NPR reported earlier on changes to SAVE.

“It is incredible what has been done, really since March,” Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who supports proof of citizenship requirements and the SAVE tool, told a gathering of state secretaries of state in Biloxi, Mississippi, last week.

Individuals registering to vote in federal elections must already sign a statement affirming they are citizens under penalty of perjury, and those who cast a ballot face criminal penalties and deportation. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But as Trump has spread falsehoods about elections, Republicans have made purging noncitizens from voter rolls a central focus.

Democratic concerns were on display last week at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference, held at the Beau Rivage casino-resort in Biloxi. In interviews on the sidelines of the conference, Democratic secretaries of state voiced deep reservations — or outright opposition — about plugging their voter data into SAVE.

Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Aug. 6 that the federal government appeared to be trying to take over election administration. She formally rejected the Justice Department’s voter roll request two days later.

Bellows said the Department of Homeland Security told her in a recent phone call that it planned to retain SAVE data for 10 years for “audit purposes only.”

“Just like the [Justice Department] is asking us to hand over an electronic file of all the voters in our state, it seems like the Department of Homeland Security is through this backdoor system also asking us to share voter information about every voter in our state,” Bellows said.

At least one state appears to have granted the federal government sweeping authority over any voter data it provides to SAVE.

Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales announced in July he had reached an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to access the newly expanded system for voter list maintenance. Indiana’s agreement allows the federal agency to use information the state provides for any purpose permitted by law, including criminal prosecutions.

Morales, a Republican, said in a news release that SAVE represented “another step in safeguarding the rights” of eligible voters. His office didn’t respond to Stateline’s questions.

The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to encourage state election officials to use the expanded program. The White House hosted a bipartisan “fly in” event for state secretaries of state on July 29. Multiple secretaries of state told Stateline that USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, who was confirmed on July 15, spoke at the event.

“The president is very much keyed in on voter list maintenance,” Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said in an interview — echoing other GOP secretaries of state who released statements praising the Trump administration after the meeting.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who attended the meeting, said he questioned how the federal government would handle voter information provided to SAVE. He added that the Justice Department’s request for his state’s voter rolls raised his level of concern about how data would be used.

“When we disclose information, particularly personal identifying information, we need to have a handle on how it’s going to be used, by whom and under what circumstances,” Simon told Stateline.

The White House referred questions about SAVE and the event to the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS.

In response to questions from Stateline, USCIS didn’t directly answer whether the agency would share voter roll data with other parts of the federal government but confirmed it disposes of records after 10 years.

“The SAVE application is a critical tool for state and local governments to access information to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country. It’s no wonder many states have quickly adopted it, and we continue to promote the tool to other states and counties not using SAVE,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said in a statement.

“We look forward to continued optimization efforts and implementing more updates to SAVE.”

GOP pressure

Some Republican election officials and Trump allies have long wanted the federal government to take an expanded role in searching state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Last summer the Trump-aligned litigation group America First Legal, co-founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, encouraged states to submit to the Department of Homeland Security the names of individuals for citizenship or immigration status verification.

Some states did just that. Texas, for example, asked USCIS to verify the citizenship of some voters in September, and Indiana asked the agency to verify 585,774 voters in October. The same month, 16 Republican state attorneys general signed a letter criticizing Homeland Security, then under the Biden administration, for failing to work with states on verification.

Trump’s DOJ wants states to turn over voter lists, election info

After Trump took office, GOP state officials kept up the pressure. Twenty-one Republican secretaries of state urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February to prioritize SAVE improvements.

On April 16, Indiana sued the department in federal court for not responding to its verification request last fall. USCIS announced an overhaul of SAVE less than a week later.

As the agency continues to remake SAVE, the tool will soon allow searches using the last four digits of a Social Security number, multiple state secretaries of state told Stateline. The agency confirmed the feature is under development and will be available soon but didn’t provide an exact date.

The change would mark another significant expansion of the program because most states collect the last four digits when individuals without a driver’s license register to vote.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said SAVE represents a better way to verify citizenship than a state law requiring voters to produce documents. “I think there’s a real opportunity for us to do a lot of this through just sharing of information and I think that’s what we’re seeing happen,” McGrane said in an interview.

Unreliable data?

But some voting rights advocates and experts on government data caution against an overreliance on Social Security data.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a progressive policy nonprofit, has noted that Social Security only began tracking the citizenship status of all applicants in 1978 — meaning the database doesn’t include comprehensive citizenship information for older Americans. Additionally, Social Security may not always have up-to-date information on the status of naturalized U.S. citizens.

The nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government also warned in May that since SAVE hasn’t used Social Security numbers to verify citizenship in the past, its accuracy and effectiveness are unknown. The success of the expanded SAVE program may also partially depend on whether it has adequate staff and resources, it said.

U.S. House passes bill targeting voting by noncitizens, which is already against the law

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report found that between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, about 16% of the nearly 90 million SAVE searches required additional verification, which the institute says often translates into federal workers manually checking files. Now that SAVE allows bulk searches, the need for manual checking could rise dramatically.

Nick Doctor, director of implementation at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview that a tool confirming the eligibility of registered voters in a way that doesn’t burden individuals can be a good thing. But he emphasized that it depends in large measure on SAVE’s implementation.

“The changes that have been made to SAVE happened very quickly and, to my knowledge, we haven’t seen releases on the level of accuracy of that information,” Doctor said.

During interviews, Republican secretaries of state stressed that voters aren’t kicked off the rolls because SAVE can’t verify their citizenship. Instead, an inability to verify would likely trigger a follow-up process with the voter.

“Just because we get something back from the SAVE database, it’s not a cut and dry, especially on those they’re not sure about,” Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said.

Still, Arizona illustrates why some Democrats worry about any large-scale effort to ask voters — especially longtime, older residents — to prove their citizenship. After the state discovered errors in how it tracked voter citizenship dating back years, election officials are contacting some 200,000 voters seeking proof of citizenship documentation.

Some have been casting ballots for decades without incident and many feel targeted, Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said during a presentation at the state secretaries of state conference. “They feel insulted when they get that letter,” Fontes said.

Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies elections, said Arizona may actually point to the potential usefulness of SAVE. If Arizona runs its voter roll through the program, a list of 200,000 voters needing citizenship verification would perhaps drop into the hundreds, he suggested.

“There’s a lot of good-government reasons to believe that something like this, governed properly and governed with fail-safe mechanisms, could have an upside,” Stewart said.

Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas told Stateline that every secretary wants tools to keep voter lists as clean as possible. But the details are important.

When she hears of something new, Thomas said she asks whether it’s the best option available and whether “the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed.” She said she’s asked USCIS a series of questions about SAVE and is waiting on some responses.

“When it comes to voter lists,” Thomas said, “I don’t want Connecticut voters to be a guinea pig.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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A voter leaves a polling place after casting a ballot in the state’s primary election on March 5, 2024, in Mountain Brook, Ala. Before the November 2024 election, the Alabama secretary of state initiated a purge of thousands of registered voters but was blocked by a federal judge. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

Alabama resident Roald Hazelhoff treasures his newly won right to vote. When election officials flagged the naturalized U.S. citizen’s voter registration for possible removal last August, the Dutch native fought back.

Hazelhoff, then a 67-year-old college instructor, sued to stop Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, from seeking to kick him and more than 3,200 other registered voters off the rolls. The lawsuit was part of a multifront legal challenge led by him and three other voters, along with voting rights groups and the Biden-era U.S. Department of Justice.

A federal judge halted Alabama’s effort within weeks — and Hazelhoff voted in his first presidential election last November without incident.

Ten months later, Hazelhoff is watching with deep concern as the Department of Justice, in President Donald Trump’s second term, is demanding that states turn over their voter registration lists and other election information, citing unspecified concerns with voter list maintenance.

“My initial reaction was of sadness that this could happen but that still a mistake could be made,” Hazelhoff, who lives in the Birmingham area, told Stateline. “Now, I’m more in a stance of saying this is the most fundamental right afforded to citizens of the United States, and I am a legal citizen of this country and I will fight for that right.”

The Trump administration’s effort to scoop up voter registration lists and other information from a growing number of states underscores how state-controlled voter lists are a major battleground in fights over access to the polls. The Justice Department told the National Association of Secretaries of State that it will eventually contact all states, an association spokesperson wrote in an email.

Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin have so far declined to provide full voter registration lists to the department amid questions over the legality of the requests and uncertainty over how the information will be used. Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows plans to deny a similar request, telling the Maine Morning Star that federal officials can “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”

The Justice Department declined a Stateline request for comment.

Even before states began tangling with the department, how election officials oversee these lists — including when and why voters can be removed — was under increasing scrutiny. The stakes for voters are foundational: How states maintain the lists determines who is on them — and therefore who is able to vote. Power over voter registration lists is the power to shape the electorate.

“Voting should be easy, not akin to trying to get a U.S. passport when it’s been lost or stolen and you’re in Nicaragua, you know what I’m saying?” Hazelhoff said. “It should be something that we encourage and this is not encouraged. This is the exact opposite.”

Some states in recent years have signed up for competing systems to help identify duplicate or noncitizen voter registrations, after the largest operation came under fire from Trump. Election officials in some states have also entered into ad hoc agreements with some of their counterparts to share data.

Other states continue to tighten voter list maintenance requirements as well. New Hampshire legislators in June approved a bill requiring local officials to verify voter lists annually instead of once a decade; the governor signed the bill on Friday. Idaho lawmakers passed a bill, signed by the governor in April, that requires state agencies to share data with the state secretary of state to help check the accuracy of voter registrations.

Chief election officials in some states tout their annual or regular elimination of registrations.

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced in mid-July that his office was sending cancellation mailers to 477,883 inactive registrants. Last week, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, directed local election officials to begin a new round of removals. The registrations will be eligible for cancellation in 2029 following a federally mandated notification process, he said in a news release.

The Trump administration is also pushing states to use a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services tool, typically used to determine the immigration status of people seeking government benefits, to identify noncitizen registered voters. The agency now allows state and local officials to conduct bulk searches using the tool, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, instead of one at a time.

Voter fraud and noncitizen voting rarely occur. But Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, along with an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment among conservatives before last year’s election, has driven attention to the voter registration lists.

Election officials and voting rights activists across the political spectrum agree accurate, up-to-date voter rolls ensure that elections remain secure. They split over how to balance cleaning the lists with protecting voters from accidental deletion — and where to draw the line between legitimate maintenance and politically driven purges.

“It has to be done fairly. It has to be done transparently. And it has to be done legally,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group that often challenges voter restrictions in court, including the Alabama effort.

“I think that any time you are doing voter list maintenance in a way that disenfranchises more people or is careless, then there has to be a hard ‘no’ on things like that,” Stewart said in an interview.

After initial request, U.S. DOJ has not obtained Wisconsin voter data

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, said he wants to find a middle ground where “everything is balanced.”

Scanlan declined to provide the Justice Department with his state’s voter rolls. He wrote in a July 25 letter that state law doesn’t authorize him to release the list to the department. Still, he noted that under the law the department could obtain voter lists by contacting local election officials.

In an interview, Scanlan also predicted the New Hampshire legislation requiring annual verification wouldn’t be an onerous change and would improve the accuracy of the rolls. He said he wants a system that makes voting easy, but one that’s also transparent and ensures everyone casting a ballot is a legitimate voter.

“I think that’s where we’re headed,” Scanlan said. “It’s not a straight line to get there.”

Undermining ERIC

Trump helped usher in the current era of division over cleaning voter rolls in March 2023 by attacking the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, and calling on states to pull out of the group. He posted on social media at the time that it “‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”

Within months, eight Republican-led states had withdrawn.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit allows member states to submit voter registration and motor vehicle department data. It also has access to Social Security death data and address change information from the U.S. Postal Service.

ERIC then identifies potential duplicate and out-of-date registrations, dead voters and possible illegal voting. Member states also reach out to individuals who are likely eligible to vote but haven’t registered, a requirement that angers some Republicans.

Some Democrats are now quick to point out what they see as the irony of Trump’s Justice Department voicing concerns with voter list maintenance practices after the president undermined ERIC — a system they say is effective in helping states clean their voter rolls.

“It is an extra layer of … hypocrisy and ridiculousness that they would turn around and be critical of the one organization” ensuring voter rolls are clean and up to date in its member states, said New York state Sen. James Skoufis, a Democrat who sponsored a bill passed by the state legislature to require New York to join ERIC. The measure hasn’t been delivered to the governor.

Twenty-five states — a mix of red and blue states, as well as presidential swing states such as Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia currently use ERIC. In an email, ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin wrote that the organization remains committed to attracting new members. Hamlin cited the New York legislation and noted that Hawaii recently joined.

Republican states haven’t coalesced around a single alternative to ERIC, but an Alabama-led system comes closest. The Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID, includes Alabama and 10 other mostly Southern states; the latest state, Virginia, joined in late May.

The Alabama secretary of state’s office, which maintains the database, didn’t respond to multiple interview requests or written questions from Stateline.

“Voter file maintenance is the foundation of election integrity,” Allen, the Alabama secretary of state, said in a June news release. “Ensuring that Alabama’s voter file is the cleanest and most accurate voter file in the country has been a top priority of mine since day one.”

As states weigh the value of ERIC and AVID, some election officials aren’t racing to pick a side.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said ERIC likely isn’t the right solution, though he said he had no reason to criticize it. To have an effective system, every state needs information from their neighboring states, as well as the states where their “snow birds” go, he said.

He identified those states as Florida in the East, Texas in the Midwest and California and Arizona in the West. Florida and Texas belong to AVID, while Arizona belongs to ERIC. California belongs to neither.

“We need a broader solution. … It’s tough in this environment, where everyone’s guards are up on the political spectrum,” McGrane said in an interview.

‘A total shock’

In Alabama, Hazelhoff said his experience demonstrates the nightmare that can unfold when voter roll cleaning crosses the line into an illegal purge.

“That was a total shock when that happened,” said Hazelhoff, who was born in the Netherlands, moved to the United States in 1977 and became a citizen in 2022.

In August 2024, he received a letter from the Board of Registrars in Jefferson County, where he lives, informing him his voter registration had been made inactive and that “you have been placed on a path for removal from the statewide voter list.”

The reason, the letter said, was that Allen had provided information showing Hazelhoff was issued a noncitizen identification number by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security while also being a registered voter.

After Hazelhoff and others sued, U.S. District Court Judge Anna M. Manasco, a Trump appointee, ruled that Allen had blown past a deadline in federal law that prohibits systematic purges of ineligible voters less than 90 days before a federal election.

Allen had announced his purge 84 days before the election, she wrote, and had later admitted his purge list included thousands of U.S. citizens. He had also referred everyone on the list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, despite the inclusion of citizens.

When Hazelhoff went to his polling place last year, he said he still felt some trepidation, even after the court ruling. He questioned whether he would be escorted out for casting an illegal vote.

“It worried me,” Hazelhoff said. “But then the actual voting experience was great and the people were polite. The system seemed to be working.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

The department has sent letters to Pennsylvania and at least eight other states in recent months asking for information related to voter list maintenance in the states under the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

The department has sent letters to Pennsylvania and at least eight other states in recent months asking for information related to voter list maintenance in the states under the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

Poll workers process ballots in Janesville, Wis., in November. A 2025 survey of local election officials found concern about federal cuts to election security. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Local election officials across the country fear the loss of federal support for election security, according to a new survey.

Sixty percent of local election officials expressed some level of concern, a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found. The center, a left-leaning pro-democracy institute, surveyed 858 officials between mid-April and mid-May.

The concern comes as President Donald Trump has curtailed federal election security work. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, in March halted its election security work. A month earlier, the Department of Government Efficiency task force also fired 130 cybersecurity workers at the agency.

And Trump in April ordered an investigation into Christopher Krebs, a former agency director who had vouched for the security of the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claims was stolen.

Federal cuts mean election officials are going to need more financial support from state and local governments, said Lawrence Norden, vice president of Brennan’s Elections and Government Program. The federal government has the advantage of being able to see the “big picture” and more easily share information with election officials across the country, he said.

“That is going to be difficult for states to replicate,” Norden said. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but they have to start rethinking how they’re sharing information about what they’re seeing with each other.”

Cybersecurity has long been a concern of states — and not just in elections. Only 22 of 48 states that participated in a voluntary 2023 cybersecurity review conducted by federal agencies met or exceeded recommended security levels.

In the Brennan survey, 36% of local election officials said they were very concerned about federal cuts to election security services, while 24% said they were somewhat concerned and 21% said they were a little concerned. Nineteen percent said they were not concerned at all.

Sixty-one percent of local election officials expressed some level of concern over cuts to the federal cybersecurity agency specifically, with 32% saying they were very concerned. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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A voter casts an early ballot at a polling station in Milwaukee in 2023. Wisconsin is among at least nine states that have received requests from the U.S. Department of Justice for voter information, raising concerns among election officials about how the Trump administration will use the data. (Photo by Morry Gash/The Associated Press)

The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking the voter registration lists of several states — representing data on millions of Americans — and other election information ahead of the 2026 midterms, raising fears about how the Trump administration plans to use the information.

The DOJ is also demanding Colorado turn over all records related to the 2024 election, a massive trove of documents that could include ballots and even voting equipment. The Colorado inquiry, the most sweeping publicly known request, underscores the extent of the administration’s attention on state election activities.

At least nine states have received requests for information over the past three months, according to letters from the DOJ obtained by Stateline. Some states also received emails from a DOJ official last week asking for meetings to discuss information-sharing agreements.

The department’s focus on elections comes after President Donald Trump directed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in March to seek information about suspected election crimes from state election officials and empowered her to potentially withhold grants and other funds from uncooperative states.

For years, Trump has advanced false claims about elections, including the idea that the 2020 election that he lost was stolen. Now back in power, his administration is taking a new level of interest in how states — and even local authorities — administer elections.

Last week, a political operative approached several Republican county clerks in Colorado to enlist them in election integrity efforts in light of Trump’s sweeping March executive order overhauling elections administration. One clerk told Stateline the operative claimed to represent the White House.

“Whatever the Trump administration tries to pull is very unlikely to be successful,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in an interview, calling Colorado elections very secure. “With that said, do I think they are trying to undermine our elections at large in this country? Absolutely.”

DOJ has sent letters to Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in addition to the request to Colorado.

The letters have typically asked election officials to describe how they register voters and work to identify duplicate registrations and individuals not eligible to vote, such as people with felony convictions and those who have died. The Washington Post earlier Wednesday reported on the letters; Votebeat and NPR previously reported on some of the letters as well.

Most letters also ask about each state’s process for flagging noncitizen applicants. Noncitizen voting is against federal law and incredibly rare, but Trump and his allies have promoted false claims about its prevalence. The Trump administration is also conducting a general crackdown on illegal immigration.

The letters call on election officials to turn over voter registration lists, which in some instances contain data on millions of residents in their states. This request has raised the most concerns, with some experts saying it’s unclear exactly why the DOJ wants the information.

“They don’t make much sense as law enforcement investigations. That makes me think that there’s some other purpose,” said Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Trump’s proof of citizenship elections order blocked for now in federal court

While many states make their voter registration lists available to the public, Levitt emphasized the data could still be largely off-limits to the federal government. Federal privacy law sometimes restricts how the government can use data that’s publicly obtainable. The DOJ may need voter information in some individual circumstances, but “that’s not blanket permission to go vacuuming up data.”

The DOJ didn’t respond to questions for this story.

Federal laws restrict the federal government’s ability to centralize information on Americans, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. Even if states provide voter registration information to the public, they often redact sensitive information.

In Orange County, California, the DOJ sued local election officials in June, seeking unredacted voter registration information, such as Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, as part of an investigation into noncitizen voting.

More than 350 election officials from some 33 states participated in a conference call about federal actions on Monday hosted by Becker, who was previously an attorney in the DOJ Voting Rights Section during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He said the interest in the call shows the level of uncertainty and anxiety over the current “federal imposition” on election administrators.

“The DOJ seems dead set on acquiring personal information on voters, including driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth — records that are highly protected under federal law and under state law and which state election officials are sworn to protect,” Becker said.

Sweeping Colorado requests

In Colorado, the amount of data the DOJ wants is enormous. On May 12, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant U.S. attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Griswold, the secretary of state, asking for access to “all records” related to the 2024 election.

Federal law requires state election officials to preserve records related to elections for 22 months. Typically, the rule ensures records are preserved in case any lawsuits are filed over an election. In the letter, Dhillon referred to a complaint against Griswold’s office alleging noncompliance with records retention laws, but provided no details.

Experts on election administration who spoke to Stateline expressed shock at the scope of the demand to Colorado. The request encompasses a vast trove of material, potentially including ballots.

“The amount of records being requested from a place like Colorado … it’s really, really significant in terms of the volume of materials that are required to be retained,” said Neal Ubriani, a former voting rights litigator at the DOJ during the Obama and first Trump administrations and the current policy and research director at the nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government.

Colorado elections have previously drawn Trump’s attention. Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a staunch Trump supporter, is serving a nine-year prison sentence after a conviction in state court for allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment in 2021.

On May 5 of this year — a week before the Dhillon letter to Griswold — Trump posted on social media that Peters should be released, calling her a “political prisoner.” Griswold noted the timing.

“I think the bigger picture is Donald Trump is continuing to try and rewrite the 2020 election and destabilize the ’26 and ’28 elections,” Griswold told Stateline.

Trump signs broad elections order requiring proof of citizenship

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office responded to the DOJ by providing copies of the state’s master voter file and voter history file. All of the information provided is also available to the public.

Some Colorado Republican county clerks in recent days have also been approached by Jeff Small, a political operative who worked at the U.S. Department of the Interior during the first Trump administration. Stateline and Colorado Newsline spoke to three GOP clerks who said they had spoken to Small last week.

Steve Schleiker, clerk of El Paso County, which includes Colorado Springs and is the most populous county in the state, said that on July 9 he received a text and call from Small, who introduced himself in a voicemail as someone who “works for the White House.”

Schleiker said that when he called back, Small said he wanted to build relationships with clerks because the Trump administration was unhappy with progress on the president’s elections executive order. He later connected Schleiker with a Homeland Security official who wanted to test the security of El Paso County’s election systems, said Schleiker, who added that he opposed the request.

Weld County Clerk Carly Koppes said she also heard from Small, but that Small told her he wasn’t under contract or being paid for the calls. Small indicated he was making the calls on behalf of former colleagues, Koppes said.

Small, a former Capitol Hill chief of staff who now works for a Colorado-based government affairs firm, didn’t return a call to his office on Wednesday. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the agency works with local partners to ensure elections remain safe.

“We don’t disclose every single conversation we have with them,” an unidentified DHS spokesperson wrote in an email.

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said he was aware of 10 clerks approached by Small. He noted that every clerk approached by Small hails from a county that uses Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems.

While Dominion is widely used in Colorado, it’s also been the subject of election conspiracy theories. A former candidate for county sheriff in southwest Colorado was arrested in June, accused of firebombing a clerk’s office. Colorado Public Radio reported the suspect, according to law enforcement, had spoken publicly about trying to get rid of the county’s Dominion machines.

“I think the really important thing to say here is that it was Republican clerks who stood up to a Republican administration and said, ‘No, we’re going to follow the law,’” Crane said.

The intent of the efforts by Small and the federal government “has been muddied up it seems,” Montrose County Clerk Tressa Guynes said. Based on her conversations with other clerks, she said, it appeared Small represented one thing to other clerks and then “represented maybe a watered-down version by the time it got to me.”

Guynes said Small wanted to discuss Trump’s elections executive order. She said Small asked whether she would be willing to support a federal task force’s efforts in an advisory role.

“I said absolutely I will advise,” Guynes said. “I said I’m frankly glad that they’re finally reaching out to the boots on the ground, the people who actually conduct the elections, instead of listening to those who have never conducted a Colorado election.”

Letters to other states

As Colorado grapples with the most far-reaching request, other states are choosing how to respond. In Wisconsin, the state election commission responded to a DOJ request for the voter registration list with instructions on how to request public voter data.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, responded on June 2 — after DOJ in a May 20 letter told the state to ensure voter registration applicants provided a driver’s license number, if they have one, instead of a partial Social Security number. The DOJ also wanted Arizona to check voters against a state database to look for noncitizens.

Fontes replied that Arizona complies with federal law and conducts checks using a state motor vehicle division database.

“We are focused on dealing with DOJ in a good faith manner while ensuring we are following the letter of federal and state laws,” Fontes spokesperson JP Martin wrote in an email to Stateline.

More recently, Arizona received a letter July 10 from DOJ about implementation of Trump’s elections executive order. Rhode Island Democratic Secretary of State Gregg Amore also received an email about the order the same day, according to a copy provided to the Rhode Island Current.

In the email, Scott Laragy, principal deputy director in the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, asks for a call to discuss a possible information-sharing agreement to provide DOJ with information on individuals who have registered to vote or have voted despite being ineligible, or those who have committed other forms of election fraud.

The email echoes the language in Trump’s elections executive order, which calls for DOJ to reach information-sharing agreements with states. While much of the order, which focused on proof of citizenship in elections, has been struck down in federal court, provisions related to information sharing remain.

The executive order directs Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, to prioritize enforcement of federal “election integrity laws” in uncooperative states. It also requires her to review grants and other DOJ funds that could be withheld from states that resist.

Some states have already struck deals with the Trump administration. Indiana Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales announced an agreement last week with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allowing the state to access a database to verify the citizenship of registered voters. Alabama Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen has signed a similar agreement.

“With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce Federal election laws and protect the integrity of Federal elections,” Laragy wrote to Rhode Island.

Janine Weisman of the Rhode Island Current and Lindsey Toomer of Colorado Newsline contributed to this report. Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.