Internal documents shed light on Trump’s crusade to vet state voter rolls
By Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration has been working for nearly a year on an effort to weed out noncitizens from voter rolls using a faulty data system while keeping those plans hidden from courts and Democratic election officials, internal Justice Department communications obtained by CNN show.
The White House was kept in the loop on the Justice Department’s progress, as it struggled to get cooperation from states in its sprawling requests for unredacted voter registration information, ultimately bringing lawsuits against 31 election chiefs. Only last month did the DOJ’s top voting lawyer acknowledge in the litigation that the department wanted to run the data through a citizenship verification system operated by the Department of Homeland Security.
Internal emails cited in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by a voter advocacy group challenging President Donald Trump’s sprawling voter data-collection and review project shed new light on the effort.
In one November 2025 email, Eric Neff, the current leader of the DOJ voting section, advised that the department keep some election officials in the dark about what the administration was intending to do with unredacted state voter rolls, which contain private information about Americans.
“I believe our reply should always be: ‘We will use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law’ and say nothing more,” Neff wrote, discussing a letter from Democratic state officials that asked administration about plans to upload the data to DHS’ “unproven and potentially insecure citizenship-check system.”
In court filings and in formal correspondence with states about the data demands, the department had provided only vague explanations that it was assessing states’ compliance with two federal laws concerning voter registration.
Neff, in the November email exchange, referenced those laws and said that “none of them require to give the states information about what we are going to do with the data.”
“No judge will have authority to limit us beyond a promise of Federal law compliance,” he said.
Noncitizen voting is very rare and is prohibited in federal elections. But Trump is fixated on the idea, claiming without evidence that even the 2016 election that he won had been tainted by the millions of illegal ballots
State can already voluntarily use the program — known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement or (SAVE) — to review their voter lists, but those reviews have shown it can produce false positives that wrongly identify eligible voters as noncitizens.
Election officials of both parties have told CNN they’re worried the administration will use the audits to pressure states to conduct flawed purges that disenfranchise Americans, and that a state’s refusal to go along with those removals will be used as a pretext to cast doubt about November’s elections.
The Constitution tasks the states with the job of running elections, giving Congress some room to regulate voting, but assigning no unilateral authority on voting rules to the executive branch.
Trump nonetheless has said he wants to “nationalize” elections. His administration’s plans to do its own review for ineligible voters on state rolls — especially when coupled with a recent Trump executive order directing the US Postal Service to play role in deciding who gets mail ballots — amounts to an unlawful usurpation of state authority, the lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges, while accusing the administration of violating federal privacy law in how its handled the information.
“DOJ is using this highly sensitive data to build — without statutory authorization — a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus that endangers millions of Americans’ fundamental voting and privacy rights,” the lawsuit says.
The Justice Department did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Internal communications shared exclusively with CNN shed new light on how the voter data project came to be, and how the administration has grappled with the resistance most states showed to the sweeping data demands.
“I want to keep things moving,” Michael Gates, a Trump-appointed attorney who oversaw voting matters last year, said in an email last summer checking in with other department lawyers on the voter data requests and other election-related cases, “There is another call with the White House next week on progress. So, we need to show what progress has been made since the last call.”
‘They fell asleep at the switch’
Multiple federal agencies are now involved in the hunt for foreigners and other ineligible voters on state registration files. Much of the effort has been focused on pushing states to use SAVE to vet their rolls for noncitizens, and since at least last May, the Justice Department has wanted to check the state voter rolls itself against that data system.
“When we receive the voter lists, we are going to work with states to help them into compliance,” Gates — who has since left DOJ — told the Civil Rights Division’s head, Harmeet Dhillon, in an August email that referenced two federal laws that set guardrails around how states maintain their voter lists. “They fell asleep at the switch with DOJ not historically enforcing NVRA/HAVA. We will help them.”
But obtaining the confidential voter records from states proved to be a complicated endeavor, and even getting an agreement finalized with DHS so that DOJ can use its immigrant data system has taken the better part of a year.
The DHS said last July the Justice Department would need to fork over $150,000 for unlimited use of the tool. “Let’s press pause on this please. We are not paying 150k. We need to get ODAG or Associates office involved and maybe WH,” a DOJ official said in an email, referring to two top offices at the Department and the White House. An agreement between DHS and DOJ was eventually finalized, DHS confirmed to CNN, but the agreement itself has not been made public.
Meanwhile, attorneys from the DOJ section that handles housing discrimination were brought in to help draft letters sent to states that asked for their unredacted voter rolls, as nearly all the career attorneys specializing in voting left or were pushed out at the beginning of Trump’s second term.
The vast majority of the states initially balked at the request for non-public, highly personal voter registration information. They cited concerns that disclosing the data could violate the federal Privacy Act and their own state privacy laws.
One of the DOJ housing attorneys remarked in a September email that the task of responding to privacy concerns raised by Utah, where a Republican oversees state election administration, “has become a bit more complicated than I expected,” as she asked a colleague for input on a response she had been drafting.
That and roughly 1,200 pages of other internal communications were obtained in Freedom of Information Act ligation by the left-leaning government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is also representing individual voters and the voter advocacy group Common Cause in the new lawsuit. Significant portions of the documents are redacted under FOIA exemptions for various privileges.
With states expressing their uneasiness with the data requests, top Trump appointees discussed offering data-sharing agreement that would put in writing its pledge to follow federal policy law.
Gates told the National Association of Secretaries of State in an August call that it would present a uniform memorandum of understanding but “the DOJ would not be negotiating 50 different MOUs that may consume months of time,” according to notes from the call he shared with a top appointee in the Civil Rights Division.
The department’s refusal to back down from a requirement in the agreement that would give states just 45 days to investigate and remove voters the administration had deemed ineligible gave even Republican election officials heartburn. Only two states agreed to those terms, while more than a dozen others have shared the data without that formal agreement.
Claims that DOJ wants to ‘federalize’ voter list maintenance
Taking the recalcitrant states to court for not providing the data has not been a smooth endeavor for the administration.
Despite Neff’s confidence last November that the department would not have to provide additional information about its plans for the voter rolls, four courts have ruled that its data demands lack an adequate “basis” and “purpose” required by the law the department is using to seek the records, and a fifth court rejected the DOJ’s case for separate reasons.
“This Court and the American people deserve to know what exactly the sensitive information of millions of Americans is going to be used for,” District Judge David O. Carter wrote in January when throwing out the administration’s lawsuit against California for the data. “The Court is not required to accept pretextual, formalistic explanations untethered to the reality of what the government has said outside of the courtroom.”
That ruling and another case are now before appeals courts, and Dhillon has said she will take the issue to the Supreme Court if need be.
After months that the administration avoided discussing in court its plans to review the records against the DHS data system, Neff laid out those intentions in a hearing late last month concerning Rhode Island’s voter data. Days later, Trump issued an executive order that instructs DHS to use SAVE and other federal databases to construct a “citizenship list” to be shared with states. For months, the administration had denied in court it was assembling a national voter registry.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday argues “DOJ lacks any statutory authority to establish a national voter registration system and federalize or otherwise take over the States’ responsibilities for voter list maintenance.”
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