DOJ admits in Rhode Island filing that voter-data analysis it denied in court has begun

On March 26, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island heard argument in United States v. Amore, the Justice Department's suit to compel Rhode Island's secretary of state to turn over the state's full voter registration list. Asked what had been done with the nonpublic voter data DOJ had already collected from other states, the United States represented that each data set was stored separately and that no analysis had been conducted. The next day, DOJ's Civil Rights Division filed a three-page "Clarification of Record" (Doc. 46) walking that representation back: "preliminary internal data analysis of the nonpublic voter registration data has begun," the division wrote, and it "has begun the process of identifying and quantifying the number and type of duplicate and deceased registered voters in each state." The filing, submitted under the name of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, maintained that the data sets remained separate and had not been shared with any other agency.

The correction did not arrive in a vacuum. One day earlier, CBS News reported that DOJ was finalizing an agreement to share state voter-roll data with the Department of Homeland Security — contradicting months of in-court assurances. At a March 19 hearing over Connecticut's rolls, a DOJ attorney told Judge Kari Dooley that transmitting the data to DHS for immigration enforcement was "not correct" and that no such decision had been made; at a March 3 hearing in Minnesota, the same attorney said the collected data was not being used for immigration enforcement "to my knowledge." Minnesota later cited the Rhode Island statements in a notice arguing DOJ had contradicted what it told that court.

The admission mattered because federal judges were probing whether DOJ's stated rationale for its roughly 30 lawsuits demanding unredacted state voter rolls — compliance review under the Help America Vote Act — was pretextual cover for immigration enforcement or a federal voter database. A "duplicate and deceased" analysis is the standard groundwork for demanding voter-roll purges. On April 17, 2026, the court rejected DOJ's suit against Rhode Island, one of a string of rulings against the department's voter-data campaign.