Padilla, Durbin Slam Trump Administration’s Unlawful Plan to Seize Private Voter Data to Purge Voter Rolls

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, slammed the Department of Justice's (the Department or DOJ) unlawful efforts to force states to surrender their voter registration lists to the Department to build an unauthorized national voter registry and pressure states to remove eligible voters from the rolls. The Senators condemned DOJ's lawsuits against eight states, including California, for their refusal to surrender unrestricted access to their states' sensitive voter information and registration lists.

In their letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Senators warned that DOJ's demands for private voter information lack basic transparency, create serious privacy and national security concerns, and exceed their legal authority over elections. They outlined how DOJ is using the data to help the Trump Administration build a national voter database, likely to compel states to purge voters using the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) recently overhauled and untested Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to sift through voter rolls.

"We write to raise serious objections to the Department of Justice's … ongoing efforts to force states to provide state voter rolls and private voter information to the Department," wrote the Senators. "We strongly oppose DOJ's efforts to pursue litigation against states that have refused to surrender unfettered access to their sensitive voter registration lists, which include personally identifiable information (PII). We are especially concerned that these actions pose serious risks to voter privacy and national security, and we stand with election officials who are ready to fight back against misuse of the data in calls for baseless purges or meritless challenges to election results."

"Put simply, it is neither the Department's job nor its skillset to micromanage how election officials purge voters from state voter rolls," continued the Senators.

The Senators highlighted that the U.S. Constitution unequivocally gives the states and Congress - not the executive branch - authority over elections, and emphasized that DOJ's lawsuits violate the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. Instead, DOJ is operating with "blind allegiance to the President's unlawful and unconstitutional" anti-voter executive order to build a massive voter database in line with Trump's unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, which he continued to make during the recent 2025 state elections.

The Senators sounded the alarm that DOJ's national citizenship registry - combined with DHS' efforts to run sensitive voter information through its SAVE program, potentially with DOJ involvement - could be used to purge state voter rolls. The information of more than 33 million voters has already been screened through this new system, leading to potential voter roll errors for Americans born before 1978 or naturalized citizens.

Furthermore, DOJ's efforts to build a centralized national voter database violate the Privacy Act of 1974, create national cybersecurity risks, and would provide U.S. adversaries with a new central target to exploit. The Senators also emphasized that the Department still has not issued a legally required System of Records Notice or a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for its ongoing efforts to collect state voter registration list data.

The Senators demanded accountability from DOJ and requested answers to a series of questions on DOJ's efforts to amass state voter data, including on the Department's supposed legal authority, the privacy and national security risks of their actions, and the risk that the Department will coerce states to purge eligible citizens from their voter rolls. They also pushed DOJ to provide a briefing on its state voter roll involvement to the Senate Rules and Judiciary Committees ahead of the 2026 elections.

"The Department is wasting significant time and energy on a dangerous 'solution' in search of a nearly non-existent problem rooted in election denial conspiracy theories. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and noncitizen voting is even rarer, according to all available data," added the Senators. "… The Administration's few public justifications for this unprecedented interference in state voter registration lists and purges of eligible voters echo the President's election denial."

Senator Padilla has led the charge in opposing the Trump Administration's thinly veiled attempts to purge voter rolls and investigate unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, including his letter with Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) opposing the reckless expansion of the SAVE program. Yesterday, Padilla delivered remarks on the Senate floor sounding the alarm on the Trump Administration's repeated attacks to undermine future elections. Padilla and Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio-03) also recently announced the Voter Purge Protection Act to prevent the Trump Administration's ongoing voter purge efforts, including by prohibiting the removal of individuals from the voter rolls due to changes in residence or not voting in previous elections.

Last month, Padilla and Senator Peters also filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit opposing the Trump Administration's illegal ongoing attempts to purge state voter rolls across the country by developing a massive interagency database of Americans' sensitive personal data. In September, Padilla condemned DOJ's lawsuits against states for seeking to protect their sensitive voter information.

Full text of the letter is available here and below:

Dear Attorney General Bondi:

We write to raise serious objections to the Department of Justice's (the Department or DOJ) ongoing efforts to force states to provide state voter rolls and private voter information to the Department. We strongly oppose DOJ's efforts to pursue litigation against states that have refused to surrender unfettered access to their sensitive voter registration lists, which include personally identifiable information (PII). We are especially concerned that these actions pose serious risks to voter privacy and national security, and we stand with election officials who are ready to fight back against misuse of the data in calls for baseless purges or meritless challenges to election results.

The Department Lacks Legal Authority to Force State Voter Purges and is Desperately Trying to Implement the Legally Flawed Executive Order 14248

Regardless of President Trump's attempted power grabs, the Constitution of the United States makes clear that states and Congress have primacy over federal elections. As such, when Congress wrote and passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. § 20510 et seq., and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), 52 U.S.C. § 20901 et seq., it was deliberate in entrusting the details of voter list management to the "discretion" of the states. This is well understood by bipartisan Secretaries of State and chief election officials across the country who regularly conduct voter list maintenance according to state law.

Put simply, it is neither the Department's job nor its skillset to micromanage how election officials purge voters from state voter rolls. The Department claims that it is pursuing these adversarial tactics pursuant to NVRA and HAVA, but its sweeping demands go far beyond the statutes' purpose of enabling federal oversight of state list-maintenance practices. The Department is also invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which was designed to prevent deprivation of the right to vote and other discriminatory practices, to demand state voter files in an unprecedented way.

DOJ appears to be driven by blind allegiance to the President's unlawful and unconstitutional Executive Order 14248. Of course, much of this executive order has been preliminarily enjoined by federal courts, and these actions by the Department have likely now made additional sections of the executive order ripe for review. The Department's largely unsuccessful track record in court with respect to the executive order, coupled with the Department's most recent legally suspect decisions, likely forecast similar findings by federal courts with respect to additional provisions of the order. The Department should cease these unprecedented activities until the legality of the executive order has been fully determined by the courts.

Demands for a National Voter Database Create Serious National Security and Privacy Risks

The Trump Administration's demands for vast amounts of voter data, aggressive tactics, and the greater potential for a centralized database of sensitive personal information pose an immense cybersecurity risk. In 2017, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity requested that states provide voter records, including the names, addresses, birthdates, partial Social Security numbers, party affiliation, conviction status and other data for every registered voter. Even then, bipartisan Secretaries of State and chief election officials pushed back against such requests, citing concerns with providing confidential information, and national security experts cautioned "the bigger the database, the greater the payoff from a potential breach." Our adversaries have attempted to undermine U.S. election integrity before, and the Department is creating a new potential target for them to exploit.

On top of these serious security risks, the Department's demands lack the necessary legal transparency and pose a serious risk to Americans' data privacy. The Department has failed to issue or update any System of Records Notice (SORN) under the Privacy Act of 1974 or any Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) in connection with its ongoing efforts to obtain voter registration list data from all 50 states. These basic data management disclosures include what data the Department is seeking, who has access to it, how the Department plans to secure it, and what the Department plans on doing with it. If the Department's motives are legitimate, then it should follow legal requirements to notify Congress and the public about its activities and provide full responses to congressional oversight requests. DOJ's inexplicable failure to do so is a troubling sign of incompetence, willful disregard of the law, or suspicious intent.

Despite the lack of public transparency, credible reports indicate that the Administration plans to use sensitive state voter information to create a national voter database, without any direction from Congress or guardrails on how the information in the database will be used. Additional reports found that the Administration has already run the information of more than 33 million voters-likely with the Department's involvement-through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database program. In fact, statements by official DOJ and DHS spokespeople have confirmed that the agencies are "sharing information" to "scrub" state voter roll data so that it is "being screened for ineligible voter entries." Unfortunately, many of the voters who may be purged as a result of these actions are unaware, given the lack of official information about which states have already handed over voter data.

Federal Efforts to Urge Purges of Eligible American Voters are Unreliable and Based on Conspiracy Theories, not Legitimate State and Local Election Administration Needs

The Department's litigation efforts combined with DHS's abuse of the SAVE program run the serious risk of states purging voter rolls of eligible voters, even if doing so would violate state and federal law. American citizens born before 1978 and naturalized citizens are the most at risk from inaccuracies in the SAVE program. In addition, the SAVE program may also generate non-matches due to missing or inconsistent citizenship information for a variety of reasons, including sloppy matching protocols and new errors introduced into the system by this Administration and DOGE's recent updates.

The Department is wasting significant time and energy on a dangerous "solution" in search of a nearly non-existent problem rooted in election denial conspiracy theories. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and noncitizen voting is even rarer, according to all available data. Nevertheless, President Trump has continued to spread conspiracy theories about millions of noncitizens voting in our elections and make false claims about how he would have won the State of California three times despite losing it by a combined 12.5 million votes in the last three elections. The Administration's few public justifications for this unprecedented interference in state voter registration lists and purges of eligible voters echo the President's election denial.

The Department's claims of improving election administration are difficult to believe, given the Administration's lack of support for the critical resources that state and local election officials actually need. President Trump's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request proposed a 40 percent cut for the Election Assistance Commission and the complete elimination of its Election Security Grants, along with the complete elimination of the Election Security Program at DHS's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Making matters worse, DOJ's demands and litigation against states will perversely divert time and resources away from the critical work that those states are already doing to ensure the accuracy of their voter lists.

Importance of Full Responses to Congressional Oversight Requests

You and others in Department leadership have sworn an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution, which unequivocally gives the states and Congress, not the Executive Branch, authority over elections. The Department also has a constitutional responsibility to be responsive to official congressional correspondence and oversight requests. As part of its written response to this letter, we expect the Department to fully answer the following questions, along with additional questions at a briefing.

A. Legal Authority:

(1) What specific constitutional and statutory authorities give DOJ the right to engage in this unprecedented level of federal intrusion into state voter registration list maintenance, including the effort to take possession of state voter registration lists and voter PII?

(2) Why is DOJ seeking information such as political party registration, which is wholly irrelevant to any legal inquiry?

(3) How is the Department in compliance with federal court injunctions on implementation of E.O. 14248?

(4) Please provide the names and titles of the relevant White House and Department of Homeland Security officials with whom you consulted on this request for sensitive voter information and any records or materials related to this consultation.

B. Privacy and National Security Risks:

(1) How is the Department complying with the Privacy Act of 1974 and its requirements to notify the public and Congress about how records of individuals are collected, maintained, used, and disseminated, along with other federal privacy requirements?

(2) What safeguards are in place to protect state voter registration lists, including voter PII, both from unauthorized use within the federal government and from external data breaches?

(3) What damage could criminal organizations or adversarial foreign nations inflict with unauthorized access to a national voter database?

(4) Please provide the names and titles of the relevant White House and Department of Homeland Security officials with whom you consulted on this request for sensitive voter information and any records or materials related to this consultation.

C. Risks of Voter Purges:

(1) The Civil Rights Division seems to have an interest in this data as a stalking horse for other Divisions within the Department or for other federal agencies. How will state voter data be used by the Department internally?

(2) How does the Department plan to share this information internally and with other federal agencies?

(3) How will the Department ensure eligible voters are not misidentified for removal from voter rolls as it runs 33 million voters and counting through new, unreliable, and untested federal databases?

(4) Will the Department commit to not using this information to coerce states to purge eligible voters via lawsuits or to challenge election results based on debunked conspiracy theories?

(5) Please provide the names and titles of the relevant White House and Department of Homeland Security officials with whom you consulted on this request for sensitive voter information and any records or materials related to this consultation.

Given the unprecedented nature of these actions by the Department and the threat of voter purges to millions of eligible American voters, we demand a thorough written response no later than November 20, 2025. We also request a briefing for the Senate Rules and Judiciary Committees on or before December 6, 2025, on the Department's activities regarding state voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sincerely,

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