How Federal Efforts to Access Voter Data Affect Our Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Democracy
Since taking office in January, the second Trump administration has launched a government-wide effort to access and aggregate an unprecedented amount of sensitive personal information on people nationwide. Following a March executive order directing federal agencies to expand their access to sensitive personal data held by other agencies and states, the administration has taken extraordinary steps to acquire Americans’ personally identifiable information (PII). As part of this effort, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has demanded access to at least 40 states’ voter files, which often contain sensitive personal information such as social security and driver’s license numbers.
The DOJ’s demands for access to state voter registration data are likely connected to the administration’s efforts to investigate unfounded claims of widespread non-citizen voting by matching state voter registration data with federal immigration datasets using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. This attempt to collect state voter data has occurred in parallel with efforts to repurpose the SAVE system as a voter and citizenship verification tool by expanding the system to include additional personal data from other federal agencies. While framed as measures to enhance election integrity, these actions could infringe on states’ constitutional authority to administer elections; perpetuate false narratives that erode trust in elections; facilitate the unjust targeting of immigrants; and raise urgent concerns about the privacy, legality, and the potential for misuse of the sensitive personal information contained in voting records.