Gallego, Colleagues Urge Justice Department to Stop Pressure Campaign to Obtain States’ Sensitive Voter Data, Purge Voter Rolls

WASHINGTON — Today, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) joined 27 Senate colleagues in pushing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop its unlawful pressure campaign to coerce dozens of states into providing the Trump Administration their voter rolls, which include voters’ personally identifiable information. Despite lacking legal authority, DOJ has sued 24 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing to hand over their full voter registration lists.  

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the senators sounded the alarm that the Administration’s efforts risk unjustified voter roll purges, pose severe privacy and national security concerns, and subvert state and local election officials’ authority to maintain registration lists.

The letter comes after Bondi wrote to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz pushing him to surrender the state’s voter rolls as part of an exchange for the Administration calling off its dangerous deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and agents to Minneapolis, an operation that has already led to the unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Additionally, two recent federal court rulings rejecting DOJ’s voter roll lawsuits in California and Oregon.

The Attorney General’s letter to Governor Walz “marked an unacceptable escalation of DOJ’s campaign to centralize state voter rolls and sensitive personal information under its control,” wrote the Senators. “It is also the clearest admission that the Department knows it lacks authority to obtain state voter rolls and is instead resorting to strong arm tactics and intimidation by force.”

“While most states are resisting this illegal voter roll grab, we are gravely concerned by the amount of sensitive data the Department has already amassed on millions of American voters,” the Senators continued. “The Department has failed to provide Congress, or the public, any information on how it is maintaining this vast amount of data, the guardrails in place to protect state voter information, how the data is to be used, or who in the federal government has access to this sensitive data.”

The Senators highlighted President Trump’s baseless claims of federal authority over elections, standing in stark contrast to American federalism and the Constitution, which outline clear roles for states and Congress but none for the Executive Branch. Trump erroneously claimed in a Truth Social post that “states are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”

Two weeks ago, federal judges in California and Oregon held that those states were not required to provide DOJ with unredacted copies of their voter registration lists. The court in California warned that “DOJ’s campaign to collect sensitive voter data … paints an alarming picture regarding the centralization of Americans’ information within the Executive Branch — without approval from Congress or Americans themselves.” The Senators pushed Attorney General Bondi to stop wasting taxpayer dollars through DOJ’s unchecked mass litigation pressure campaign that jeopardizes data privacy and could lead to voter purges.

Despite the Administration’s claims, voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, made even clearer by a review of Texas’ voter registration list of more than 18 million voters through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. The review flagged only 33 people — 0.000001% of registered voters — as potentially having voted illegally in the 2024 election.

As DOJ has sharply increased its possession of voter registrations and data, including from Texas and at least seven other states who have already relinquished their complete voter registration lists, the Senators stressed that recent changes to and the expanded use of the insufficiently tested SAVE program could lead to some individuals mistakenly being flagged as noncitizens, threatening their right to vote. DOJ’s pressure campaign, in collaboration with outside election denier groups, to coerce state voter registration lists and run them through the SAVE program has already led to issues. Last month, 70 county clerks in Missouri sent a letter to state House and Senate leadership underscoring that the flawed SAVE program has erroneously flagged individuals known by the county clerks to be U.S. citizens, including voters that the clerks personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.

Read the full letter HERE.