Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., warned Social Security Administration chief Frank Bisignano that any follow-through on President Donald Trump’s executive order creating a new database of U.S. voters using agency data would be viewed by Democrats as a conscious choice on the part of SSA officials to participate in “blatant voter suppression.”

“Facilitating Donald Trump’s directive to create a flawed voter database would be willing participation in blatant voter suppression ahead of consequential midterm elections,” Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Bisignano sent Friday.

The executive order, issued March 31, directs the Homeland Security secretary, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to compile lists of American voters for each state, including their supposed citizenship status.

To build the lists, the agencies would rely on the controversial Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database that DHS has been building under the Trump administration, as well as Social Security and federal citizenship and naturalization records.

Those lists would then be transmitted to states, most of which have already rejected previous Trump administration efforts to collect voter data or dictate voter registration lists. Another section of the order would direct the postmaster general to develop a similar state-by-state list of voters eligible to vote by mail.

“The clear intent of this executive order is to undermine vote-by-mail and disenfranchise eligible voters,” Wyden wrote. “SSA has a duty to ensure its data is not misused as part of this effort.”

Wyden echoed numerous state officials and election experts in calling the Trump administration’s executive order an unconstitutional encroachment by the executive branch on election authorities that the U.S. Constitution clearly delineates to Congress and the states.

The White House’s executive order has already been challenged in lawsuits from states officials and voting rights advocates, and a previous, less ambitious executive order issued last year that attempted to assert similar executive branch authorities was largely overturned by U.S. courts.

Wyden’s missive essentially asks Bisignano to consider whether following the Trump administration’s order would conflict with his responsibility to safeguard Social Security records under laws like the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act.

He asks how the agency will ensure it’s not disenfranchising voters, and whether it sought permission from citizens to use their Social Security data for a federal elections list, noting that the agency’s own regulations limit the sharing of Social Security data to “routine use for determining eligibility or amount of benefit in a health or income maintenance program.”

Expanding the agency’s role to elections — an area it has no background or experience in — would be in direct conflict with those rules.

“Simply put, sharing Americans’ personal data to DHS for creating a ‘state citizenship’ list does not meet this standard,” Wyden wrote.

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Republicans in Congress are moving ahead with two pieces of legislation this week that would dramatically reshape the nation’s election laws.

Together, the SAVE America Act and MEGA Act would shift key voter certification powers to the executive branch,  require stricter proof of citizenship for voter registration, and allow states to more easily access federal immigration databases to track and remove “potential” or “suspected” noncitizens from voter rolls.

The SAVE America Act passed through the Rules Committee late Tuesday on a 9-4 partisan split, teeing up a full house vote on the bill. The bill would require voters to use a passport, birth certificate or REAL ID to register to vote and requires voters to prove their identity and citizenship in person.

Changes to the committee bill include a new section requiring states to send lists of all eligible voters to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements database and placing the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration at the head of a federal voter citizenship certification process.

Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said a manager’s amendment filed overnight would also exempt overseas military voters and their families from in-person identification requirements and make the law effective immediately.

Additionally on Tuesday, the House Committee on Administration held a hearing on another bill, the MEGA Act, also sponsored by Steil. That bill would discount all mail-in ballots received after the close of polls on Election Day, require the Attorney General to certify election funding for states, and authorize the AG to sue states that don’t comply with federal election requirements.

It would also allow private individuals to sue any election official “who registers an applicant to vote in an election for Federal office who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship.”

The data tells a different story

Steil cast counting ballots past Election Day as untrustworthy, comparing it to playing a corrupt card game.

“Imagine if you went to a casino and played cards and you’re playing with the dealer, and at the very end…the dealer says ‘You know what, I’m not going to flip over my cards for three or four days,’ ” he said. “You could be playing with the pope and you wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in exactly what is taking place.”

But the delays in counting ballots in three states in the 2020 election – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – had a clear explanation: state laws prevented election officials from processing mail-in ballots until Election Day or the day before, forcing them to prioritize in-person votes first before moving to mail-in ballots – which ended up leaning heavily Democratic.

New research from the Center for Election Integrity and Research released this week found that many claims of suspected noncitizen voting are wildly inflated when investigated. Executive director David Becker said the data gives “a very good sense of the depth of the problem” around noncitizen voting, which he called “infinitesimally rare.”

“President Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security has checked more than 49 million voter records, and they themselves admit that 99.98% of those records represented confirmed citizens,” Becker said in a statement. “In several states that are politically aligned with President Trump, the number of alleged noncitizen voters has precipitously dropped when subjected to scrutiny.”

 Congressional Democrats unanimously opposed the bills, arguing they would disenfranchise legal voters in an effort to address a problem that post-election audits show  is exceedingly rare.

Rep.  Julie Johnson, D-Texas, said Congress must respect “the fundamental constitutional right of every citizen to cast a ballot.” That obligation would affect citizens without birth certificates or passports married women who have changed their names, and voters with limited access to election offices where they must provide citizenship in person.

“The problem with this bill is you’re putting all these administrative burdens in place to keep citizens from voting,” she said, adding later that “it is unamerican, unconstitutional, and just dead ass wrong.”

A decade of finger pointing 

It’s not clear what authorities or figures Steil was citing to justify the bill. For instance, approximately 98 percent of voters already cast their ballot on voting machines with a paper backup record.

Further, election experts don’t say winners must be declared on Election Day. Many argue the opposite: that calling races too early—or refusing to count ballots legally postmarked on Election Day but take days to arrive-—can disenfranchise legitimate voters.

The MEGA Act has support from GOP-controlled states. Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray told lawmakers Tuesday it would impose “baseline common sense standards” for elections nationwide. Gray also said he stood “in complete support of” President Trump’s March 2025 executive order on elections—though major sections of that order have since been struck down by courts for being unconstitutional. 

 After the 2016 election, Republicans resisted national election administration laws, arguing states should control election administration. 

Now, they face similar arguments about their legislative package.

Rep.  Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said it was “preposterous that the same Republicans who spent their entire careers demanding that states – not the federal government, states – should run their elections are now suddenly begging for federal intervention.”

Karen Brinson Bell, who led North Carolina’s State Board of Elections until last year, warned that the bill’s rigid photo ID mandates would override current systems even in most states—even those that already have voter ID laws. She also said the requirements would impose   a one-size-fits-all approach on election systems that have diverse, locally driven needs.

 “The needs of communities in Wyoming differ from those in Michigan and North Carolina,” Brinson Bell said. “Decentralized election administration is a feature, not a bug, of our democratic system.”

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A federal court has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the Trump administration attempting to force the state of California to turn over sensitive voter data.

The decision, issued by the U.S. Central District Court of Southern California, is a major setback to the federal government’s massive data collection effort on American voters, and its argument that existing civil rights laws permit it to demand that information from states in the name of election integrity.

The ruling, signed by Judge David Carter, called voting “a fundamental political right” and stated flatly: “the government’s request is unprecedented and illegal.”

Carter noted that the civil rights laws the Department of Justice cited to justify its demand for the records were “to protect hard won civil rights victories allowing access to the ballot box,” not to give the executive branch or president unfettered access to voter data.

The opinion also described the breadth and scope of the government’s request as “unprecedented,” noting it was seeking information such as names, social security numbers, home addresses, voting history and “other sensitive information” for nearly 23 million Californians. While California officials offered the federal government redacted versions of the information, DOJ’s lawsuit asked for the full, unredacted copies of the records.

“The pieces of legislation at issue in this litigation were not passed as an unrestricted means for the Executive to collect highly sensitive information about the American people,” Carter wrote. “It is not for the Executive, or even this Court to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans. That power belongs solely to Congress.”

Last September, the federal government sued California Secretary of State Shirely Weber—one of dozens of state officials facing federal lawsuits for  refusing to hand over unredacted voter data. The federal government claims the lawsuits are meant to ensure “clean” voter rolls and deter noncitizen voting and voter fraud, but neither it nor Trump have ever been able to prove their claims in court.

Election and legal experts have predicted that the administration’s efforts to compel states to hand voter records over to the federal government would face serious pushback in the courts, as the constitution explicitly empowers states and Congress to manage elections.

The League of Women Voters of California, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California brought a joint countersuit on behalf of voters to halt the DOJ’s demands. The groups argued state laws and federal privacy protection prohibited the disclosure of highly sensitive voter data.

In a joint statement following the decision, the groups hailed the win and said it “affirms that the federal government is not entitled to unfettered access to private voter data.”

“Voters should never have to choose between their privacy and their fundamental right to vote,” the statement said. “States must retain authority to manage elections in ways that safeguard sensitive information, and federal agencies must respect the limits on their power.”

Carter also issued a stark warning about the impact of adopting the Trump administration’s legal logic on ballot access, saying that “the taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by piece until there is nothing left.”

“The case before the Court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans,” Carter wrote. The erosion of privacy and rolling back of voting rights is a decision for open and public debate within the Legislative Branch, not the Executive. The Constitution demands such respect, and the Executive may not unilaterally usurp the authority over elections it seeks to do so here.”

The administration’s demand to states like California “goes far beyond what Congress intended” when it passed the underlying civil rights laws cited in the government’s justification, and citizens would rightly fear that the data could be misused by “executive fiat.”

“The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose,” Carter wrote in his conclusion.

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Forty Democratic members of the House and Senate issued a joint letter Wednesday to 19 states led by Democratic governors, urging them to block Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies from accessing driver’s license and registration data in their states.

The letter, led by Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., to follow the lead of states like New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington in pulling out of data sharing agreements with a state-led consortium known as The International Justice and Public Safety Network (NIets), a nonprofit that shares state data with police agencies.

 Doing so, the members argued, will protect citizens of their states from federal overreach by “federal agencies that are now acting as Trump’s shock troops.”

“This common sense step will improve public safety and guard against Trump officials using your state’s data for unjustified, politicized actions, while still allowing continued collaboration on serious crimes,” the congressional Democrats’ wrote.

Citing data provided to Congress by NIets, between Oct. 1, 2024 and Oct. 1 2025, the consortium processed over 290 million requests for state DMV data across 18,000 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments in the US and Canada. Those requests included nearly 300,000 from ICE and another 605,000 by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security.

While states can choose what data they share with NIets, the letter claims that the Arizona Department of Public Safety “provides law enforcement agencies outside your state with real time access to your state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, which includes driver’s licenses and other state issued ID cards” through NIets. This effectively means that whatever states share with Arizona are subsequently sent to law enforcement agencies around the country.

““To be clear, blocking agencies’ unfettered access to your state’s data through Nlets will not prevent federal law enforcement from obtaining information needed to investigate serious crimes, but taking these measures will significantly increase accountability and reduce abuse by permitting your state employees to review data requests from blocked agencies first,” the members wrote.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Public Safety referred CyberScoop to the Arizona Department of Transportation, which manages the state’s Motor Vehicles Division.

While all 50 states and Washington D.C. allow law enforcement to look up DMV data using a driver’s license number, at least 20 states and D.C. allow searches by name and date of birth, something congressional Democrats warned could facilitate broader dragnet-style surveillance.

Additionally, 41 states share driver’s license photos with law enforcement upon request, something that could feed facial recognition software programs around the country. Agencies like ICE have developed massive facial recognition databases that play a central role in immigration enforcement and citizenship validation, according to 404 Media, though it’s not clear if that database includes driver’s license photos.

Officials at DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency also made numerous technical updates this year to another federal database, the Systemic Alien Verification System (SAVE), to check the citizenship of voters. The database was altered to allow states to run bulk searches and merged with Social Security data, and the federal government has spent the past year collecting or demanding more state-level data on voters, including DMV information.

The letter urges Democratic governors to consult with their state NIets coordinator, stating the belief that due to technical complexities with how the system works and how requests are processed, many states may not even be aware of what they’re doing.

“Because of the technical complexity of Nlets’ system, few state government officials understand how their state is sharing their residents’ data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” they wrote. “Critically, it seems apparent that elected officials accountable to voters, including governors, attorneys general, and legislators have not been fully briefed on the current scale of state information sharing with ICE and other federal agencies, nor the availability of technical controls to restrict data sharing with these federal agencies.”

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