DOJ concealed from courts and states its plan to vet voter rolls against DHS citizenship data, internal emails revealed

On April 21, 2026, a coalition of voting-rights groups — the voting advocacy organization Common Cause and individual voters from Texas and Nebraska, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the ACLU, Protect Democracy, and Harvard Law School's Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic — filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging the Trump administration's nationwide voter-data-collection project. The complaint, together with roughly 1,200 pages of internal Justice Department communications that CREW obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, revealed that the department had spent nearly a year collecting states' unredacted voter rolls in order to cross-reference them against the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) citizenship-verification system, while withholding that intent from the courts weighing its demands and from Democratic election officials.

In a November 2025 email cited in the lawsuit, Eric Neff, the leader of the DOJ Voting Section, advised that the department tell states only, "We will use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law" and "say nothing more," responding to Democratic officials who had asked about plans to upload the data to DHS's system. Neff wrote that the relevant federal laws did not require DOJ "to give the states information about what we are going to do with the data" and asserted that "no judge will have authority to limit us beyond a promise of Federal law compliance." In court filings the department had offered only vague explanations that it was assessing states' compliance with two federal voter-registration laws, and only in March 2026 did it acknowledge in litigation that it wanted to run the data through SAVE.

The voter rolls at issue contain names, addresses, dates of birth, and partial Social Security or driver's-license numbers. Most states initially refused the demands, citing the federal Privacy Act and state privacy laws, and the department sued 31 election chiefs to compel production of the unredacted data. The lawsuit alleges DOJ lacks statutory authority to establish a national voter registration system and is building "a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus that endangers millions of Americans' fundamental voting and privacy rights." The White House was kept apprised of the department's progress throughout the effort.

Updates

2026-02-19 — Democratic and Republican parties moved to intervene on opposing sides in DOJ's Wisconsin voter-file suit [8]

DOJ's suit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed in December 2025 as part of this same national campaign, drew formal party intervention in February 2026: the Democratic National Committee, represented by Perkins Coie, moved in early February to join the case on WEC's side, and the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a brief on February 19 supporting DOJ's demand. The DNC argued the request threatens the privacy of roughly 1.5 million registered Wisconsin Democrats and that DOJ intends to transfer the data to DHS as part of the same national voter file documented in this entry's underlying litigation.

2026-04-03 — DOJ privacy officer Kagle resigned; Neff confirmed DHS SAVE sharing at hearing [7]

On April 3, 2026, NPR / Spokane Public Radio reported that Kilian Kagle, the DOJ Civil Rights Division's chief FOIA and privacy officer, had resigned amid the department's push to share state voter rolls with DHS's SAVE citizenship-verification database. At a Rhode Island hearing the same day, Voting Section leader Eric Neff publicly confirmed that DOJ intended to upload the collected voter data to SAVE. Federal judges in California and Oregon had also separately rejected the department's voter-data demands.

2026-05-19 — Plaintiffs moved for partial summary judgment [4]

Common Cause and the individual plaintiffs filed a motion for partial summary judgment asking the court to block DOJ from assembling a national voter database.

2026-06-02 — DOJ moved to dismiss [4]

The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the suit or, in the alternative, for summary judgment.

2026-06-24 — Sixth Circuit rejected DOJ's demand for Michigan's unredacted voter file [5, 6]

A divided Sixth Circuit panel ruled 2-1 that DOJ could not compel Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to produce the state's unredacted voter registration file — including dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers, and driver's license numbers — under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, finding the statute's "came into possession" language did not reach a file the state created and maintains itself. The ruling capped a separate but related appeal in which Benson's office, in an April 13, 2026 brief, argued DOJ's stated legal justification for the data demand was pretextual and that the department's actual purpose was to compile a nationwide, statutorily unauthorized voter file — the same scheme documented in this entry's underlying Common Cause litigation.