The Trump administration wants your voter data.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, the Department of Justice has made an ambitious effort to collect sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including information that one election expert described as “the holy trinity” of identity theft: Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth.

In states where Trump’s party or allies control the levers of government, this information is handed over willingly. In states where they do not, the DOJ has formally asked, then threatened and then sued states that refuse. The department has also claimed many of these reluctant states are failing to properly maintain their voter registration rolls, and has pushed states to more aggressively remove potentially ineligible voters.

This week, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced new legislation that seeks to defang those efforts by raising the legal bar for states to purge voters based on several factors, such as inactivity or changing residency within the same state.

The Voter Purge Protection Act, introduced by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, would amend the National Voter Registration Act to make it more difficult for states to kick large numbers of voters off their rolls for actions that Democrats — and many election officials — say are common, overwhelmingly benign and not indicative of voter fraud.

Padilla told reporters that the legislation would help ensure “that Americans cannot be stripped of their right to vote without proof that a voter has either passed away or has permanently moved out of their state.”

Voters targeted for removal must also be notified by election officials “so that there’s no surprise when they show up to vote on election day that their name is not on the list and it’s too late to address whatever the issue may or may not be,” Padilla said.

Beatty pointed to her home state, where Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose removed more than 155,000 voters from active voter rolls in 2024, as an example where federal protections are needed. The primary factor for purging those voters were records showing they had not cast a ballot in an election for the past four years.

She claimed more than half of the voters who stand to be affected by similar purges in 2025 and 2026 are registered in counties where demographic minorities make up a majority of voters.

“Let me be clear: voting is not use-it-or-lose the right, because too often these so-called voter purges have silenced voices, people of color, people of low income communities, and even our seniors who have waited and fought for the right to vote,” Beatty said.

Meanwhile, a comprehensive post-election audit conducted by LaRose’s office in 2024 identified and referred 597 “apparent noncitizens” on state voter rolls to the state Attorney General for further review, out of 8 million state voters. Critically, 459 of those registered voters never cast an actual ballot, and similar audits performed by LaRose in 2019, 2021 and 2022 found that such people made up similarly miniscule percentages of all active registered voters in the state. Last month, his office put out a press release touting an additional 78 “apparent noncitizens” registered, 69 of whom had no evidence of voting.

“States have the responsibility to keep accurate voter rolls and ensure election integrity,” LaRose added. “In order to meet that responsibility, we need more access to data from the federal government. I will continue to push until we have the resources we need to do our jobs to the standard Ohioans deserve.”

As any state election official will tell you, voter registration lists are never static — every day, people die, get married (or divorced), take on different names, become naturalized citizens or experience a range of other life events that can impact their registration status or result in outdated information. Further, it’s not typically viewed as unusual or a sign of fraud when voters sparingly make use of their registration to vote, though most election experts endorse some level of database maintenance to remove inactive voters.  

But it is often these discrepancies that get highlighted by Trump and state allies as evidence of unacceptably messy voter rolls that justify stricter removal policies.

And there are election officials — mostly in Republican-controlled states — who have embraced the philosophy that even small numbers of questionable registrations or voter fraud must be aggressively stamped out or it will lead to American voters losing faith in their democracy. LaRose and Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have long championed a similar approach to voter maintenance, and have called for Congress to pass laws making it easier for states to remove voters during election years.

“List maintenance is about election security and voter confidence,” Raffensperger said last month while announcing that approximately 146,000 Georgia voters would be moved to inactive voter rolls, including 80,754 voters who had moved to another county within the state. “We want every Georgian to have full faith in the system, knowing that our elections are free, fair — and fast.”

Critics have pointed out that states already have numerous, effective means for preventing mass voter registration or fraud that have been borne out by post-election audits finding very low instances of fraud, and that overly harsh policies around list maintenance can and do end up disenfranchising far more eligible voters than bad actors. Further, they argue against removing large numbers of voters without a robust follow-up process from states to give affected voters an opportunity to appeal or address any discrepancies that may affect their registration.

The bill has 22 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate and 24 in the House but is unlikely to gain serious consideration under a Republican-controlled Congress, where most GOP members have long believed voter fraud is rampant and are broadly supportive of state and federal efforts to remove voters based on those same factors.

Asked by CyberScoop how Democrats would navigate that reality, Padilla said the legislation was part of a broader overall effort to push back on these efforts at all levels of constitutional governance. That includes states fighting to protect their constitutional role as administrators of elections when denying data requests from the federal government, within the court system as states and voting rights groups fight in court to block the administration’s use of the SAVE database as a pretext for voter removal, and through public awareness and politics.

Teeing up legislation to prevent states from potentially disenfranchising voters from spurious purges, he said, is part of asserting Congress’ constitutional role in a much broader fight about the way elections are run.

“We’re pushing back on it at every turn and calling attention to it, so that voters understand what they may be facing and make all the necessary preparations so that their right to vote is not denied, whether it’s in next year’s midterm elections or even other regular or special elections before then,” Padilla said.

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Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database.

Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans.

On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits.

“This administration’s attempt to manipulate federal data systems to unlawfully target its own citizens and purge voters is one of the most serious threats to free and fair elections in decades,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The League is asking the court to act swiftly to stop this abuse of power before it disenfranchises lawful voters. Every citizen deserves privacy, fairness, and the freedom to vote without fear of government interference.”

In an Oct. 7 court filing, the groups said an immediate injunction was needed to prevent permanent privacy harms due to the “illegal and secretive consolidation of millions of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies into centralized data systems” through SAVE.

“While Plaintiffs’ Complaint challenges a broader set of Defendants’ unlawful data consolidation, Plaintiffs here seek emergency relief concerning one particularly harmful and urgent facet of Defendants’ conduct: their overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (“SAVE”) system,” the groups wrote.

In addition to SAVE, the lawsuit also claims the existence of “at least one other Interagency Data System that consolidates other data sources from around the government that might have information concerning immigrants into a centralized ‘data lake’ housed at” U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services.

Federal agencies collect massive amounts of data on Americans as part of their work, but the groups argue the 1974 Privacy Act and other privacy laws were explicitly designed to prevent the kind of large, centralized federal datasets on Americans the administration is putting together. Subsequent legislative updates in 1988 amended the Privacy Act to specifically prohibit the use of “computer matching programs” that compare data across different agencies without informing Congress or publicizing the written agreements between agencies.

“For decades, these protections have guarded against improper data pooling across federal agencies, preventing the government from building a potentially dangerous tool for surveilling and investigating Americans without guardrails,” the voting groups wrote. “Until now.”

As CyberScoop reported earlier this year, USCIS, along with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), began merging SAVE data with other major federal data streams — including federal Social Security data — while removing fees and building in the technical capacity for states to conduct easier, bulk searches of voters against the database. The Department of Justice has sought voter data from all 50 states, with some cooperating and others refusing. Last month, the administration sued six states to force them to hand over voter data that would be used in SAVE.

Less than a week before the suit was filed, the Social Security Administration released a redacted copy of its information-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, which claims that “personnel have been directed to comply, to the maximum extent possible and permissible under law … taking into account federal statutory requirements, including the Privacy Act of 1974 … as well as other laws, rules, regulations, policies, and requirements regarding verification, information sharing, and confidentiality.”

Administration officials say the overhaul is needed to crack down on instances of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud, but such fraud is exceedingly rare outside a handful of isolated cases, as numerous academic studies and post-election audits have proven.

DOGE officials were singled out in the lawsuit for particularly egregious violations, accused of embarking on a “months-long campaign to access, collect and consolidate vast troves of personal data about millions of U.S. citizens and residents stored at multiple federal agencies.”

An executive order from the Trump administration earlier this year sought to explicitly empower the DOGE administrator, along with DHS, to “review” state voter registration lists and other records to identify noncitizen voters. That order is still the subject of ongoing lawsuits challenging its legality.

In this case, the plaintiffs claim the need for emergency relief is urgent as the Trump administration is simultaneously challenging the accuracy of state voter rolls in courts across the country, while “encouraging and enabling states to use unreliable [Social Security Administration] citizenship data pooled in the overhauled SAVE system to begin purging voter rolls ahead of fast-approaching November elections and to open criminal investigations of alleged non-citizen voting.”

“Both the ongoing misuse of Plaintiffs’ sensitive SSA data through the overhauled SAVE system, and the increased risk of cybertheft and additional misuse, qualify as irreparable injuries,” the filing states.

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As the Trump administration has sought to muscle through changes to election laws and rules across the country, Democrats in Congress have steadily escalated their concerns about the potential for disenfranchisement.

At a public forum Wednesday held by Democratic lawmakers focused on elections and voter suppression, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., ranking member on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, issued a blunt charge at the White House and its Republican allies.

“Their goal is to amplify their false narrative of insecure elections to justify their power grabs and to make it harder to register to vote, to stay on the polls and to actually cast your ballot,” Padilla said.

Padilla was one of several Democrats and witnesses who accused Republicans — who did not participate in the forum — of inflating concerns about noncitizen voting to justify legal and legislative challenges to swaths of votes, sometimes based on minor paperwork errors that took place decades ago.

One of the Democrats’ key witnesses was Allison Riggs, the Democratic North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice who had her narrow, 734-vote victory last year challenged in court by her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin.

Griffin and state GOP officials ultimately challenged 65,000 votes in four counties as illegal, including those belonging to people who didn’t have driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file and overseas voters. The challenge involved only voters in four Democratic-leaning counties, and only for Riggs’ race. It did not challenge those voters’ choices for the U.S. presidential and North Carolina gubernatorial elections.

A winding court battle saw Riggs spend more than $2 million in court costs to prove that her tabulated lead — which survived two recounts — was legitimate. While a federal court eventually intervened to declare Riggs the winner, she told lawmakers that “we came perilously close to watching our systems of rules-based elections crumble before our eyes” as state courts initially validated Griffin’s argument.

“Our state appellate courts were willing to give credence to the argument that the rules of an election could be changed after the election, to change the election outcome,” Riggs said.

She said she sees the legal battle over voter eligibility in her race as a blueprint for how similar challenges could be made in future elections.

“The precedent in my case is at the district level,” Riggs said. “We were prepared for it to go all the way [to the Supreme Court.] I think it is still likely [to happen again] absent our collective willingness to recognize this threat and take the appropriate steps.”

Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, which runs one of the largest voter outreach programs for military veterans and families, said many of the North Carolina voters who had their ballots flagged as suspicious in lawsuits from Griffin’s campaign and the Trump Department of Justice were members of the military serving overseas who followed state laws.

Riggs noted that her own parents were among the group of voters who had their eligibility questioned in Griffin’s legal challenge, emphasizing that her father initially registered decades ago using his military ID and has shown a valid ID during every election he’s voted in.

“President Trump has publicly attacked these ballots and pushed conspiracy theories about them,” Goldbeck said, in addition to disparaging those who registered through laws like the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act as taking advantage of a “voting loophole.” 

She also said current legislation being considered by Congress, like the SAVE Act, would require military voters and their families to register to vote in person using a passport, something that would be impossible for many people deployed overseas. 

Some observers have worried the Trump administration and GOP may be seeking to redefine how certain classes of voters and ballots are considered and handled by states and courts, chiefly by shifting the burden of proof away from the government and onto individual voters when it comes to validating citizenship.

The Trump administration and Republicans have justified such changes as necessary to ensure American elections aren’t tainted by noncitizen voting. Experts and post-election audits largely refute those charges, but GOP boosters have argued that even one noncitizen voting in a U.S. election is too many. 

In particular, they’ve pointed to the administration’s changes to the Systemic Aliens Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those changes include allowing states to search using Social Security numbers and to conduct “bulk” queries that can be matched against various state and federal databases.

Just how USCIS and state election officials use this information when identifying voters for potential removal from state voter rolls remains to be seen — and experts say the amount of time and assistance states provide to help voters cure any paperwork problems will be critical. A brief by the Fair Elections Center this week questioned the accuracy of using Social Security numbers to validate citizenship information of voters, noting the Social Security Administration didn’t even start requiring such information for applicants until 1972.

According to VoteBeat, David Jennings, the technology and policy lead for SAVE at USCIS, reportedly told state officials at an Oklahoma conference that the agency doesn’t share SAVE data with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or other agencies. He described SAVE as a “tool” for states to use when making decisions around a voter’s registration status, not the sole criteria.

The administration is also suing states, sending them information requests and working with cooperative ones to build a massive query system across state data streams that experts say is likely to sweep in far more eligible voters and ballots than noncitizens registered to vote.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, described these data requests as “either illegal or [an] attempt to effectuate illegal acts” that violate the U.S. Privacy Act of 1972, which prohibits federal agencies from collecting and sharing large amounts of personal information on Americans.

Meanwhile, policy blueprints like Project 2025 propose “in plain view, a monstrous abuse of DOJ authority, pursuing faceless persecutions of elections officials” that mirrors the White House’s ongoing efforts to impose its will on state and local election rules, Levitt said.While most judges are pushing back, and election officials are largely standing firm in most states, Levitt worries that they will have to carry out their duties securing U.S. elections “despite, not alongside, our federal government.”

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As the Department of Homeland Security seeks to transform a federal database for immigrant benefits into a supercharged database to search for noncitizen voters, a trio of Democratic senators are pressing the department for more information.

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday posing a series of questions around the department’s overhaul of the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.

“States and nonpartisan voter advocacy organizations have expressed concerns with using the SAVE program as a standalone tool to determine voter eligibility without adequate safeguards,” the senators wrote. “In particular, there are concerns that data quality issues may cause state and local officials who rely on the program to receive false positives or incomplete results.”

The lawmakers’ comments echo many of the same concerns around SAVE that election officials and experts expressed to CyberScoop last month. For a variety of reasons — including SAVE’s clunky history, the fluid nature of immigration status and differing state data streams — the potential is high for the system to return false positives.

Further, the Trump administration has already attempted to force states to adopt White House policies around “proof of citizenship” requirements before sending them federal voter registration files. A federal judge ruled parts of that order were unconstitutional, and the administration is appealing. 

One concerning scenario is that if the administration pushes states to use SAVE to update and maintain their voter rolls, many registered voters could be removed for lacking documentary proof of citizenship.

While a number of post-election audits and investigations have determined that noncitizen registration and voting is rare to nonexistent, it has also found that millions of eligible voters lack the kind of identification that the Trump administration is pushing.

The administration has been filing lawsuits and sending letters to states alleging that their voter registration policies are out of step with the Help America Vote Act, which provide funding to states for election security investments.

If successful, it could force millions of voters to obtain these credentials or lose their voting rights, all without the administration ever actually showing evidence that noncitizen voting is happening en masse.

The Democratic senators note that DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service have not briefed Congress or state and local election officials about the changes, but they have held meetings with prominent election denier groups like the Election Integrity Network, according to reporting from Democracy Docket.

Much of the work on SAVE is happening outside of public view, with little transparency.. USCIS has declined or not responded to interview requests from reporters seeking additional details about the SAVE overhaul or how it will ensure accurate results.

“Public transparency and assurances that the Department is appropriately protecting citizens’ rights, including privacy, is extremely important,” the lawmakers wrote. “Unfortunately, DHS has not issued any of the routine and required documentation about the program’s operations and safeguards or issued any public notice or notice to Congress.”

The senators are requesting a briefing for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Rules and Administration committees, while turning over any materials shared with groups like the Election Integrity Network.

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