The Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly shared state voter-registration data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite earlier assurances to state election officials that the information would only be used for routine voter-list maintenance. Beginning in May 2025, DOJ requested full statewide voter files from several states, including sensitive details such as dates of birth, home addresses, driver’s-license numbers, passport numbers, and portions of Social Security numbers, claiming the purpose was compliance with federal election laws under HAVA and the NVRA.
On August 28, 2025, DOJ officials told secretaries of state that the data would be used solely to review list-maintenance practices. Then, on September 11, a DHS official informed those same election leaders that DHS had not requested or received any voter information and had no intention of using it. However, reporting that same day showed DHS had, in fact, received voter data from DOJ and was preparing to upload it into the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a federal immigration-status database originally used to verify eligibility for public benefits. The SAVE system has since been modified to accept bulk uploads and now explicitly lists voter-verification and voter-roll maintenance among its purposes.
This data sharing has triggered legal and constitutional concerns. Data sharing at this scale appears to expand federal power into state-administered elections, raising serious questions about the constitutional authority of states to control and manage their own election systems. Additionally, the Privacy Act of 1974 requires federal agencies to publish a System of Records Notice (SORN) before introducing new uses for collected data disclosing the purpose, routine uses, and categories of records. The delayed or retroactive notice for the expanded SAVE system suggests that these legal requirements may not have been properly met.
Beyond the legal implications, this situation poses real risks for everyday Americans. State voter files contain highly sensitive personal information, and uploading those details into a federal immigration-verification database could expose millions of U.S. citizens to data breaches, identity theft, or future government uses that they never consented to. Because the SAVE system is known to contain incomplete or outdated records, U.S. citizens may be wrongly flagged as non-citizens due to name changes, clerical errors, or mismatched files resulting in voters being removed from rolls or forced to prove their citizenship just to cast a ballot. These errors disproportionately affect naturalized citizens, Latino and Asian American voters, and mixed-status families, potentially discouraging eligible voters from participating at all.
The knowledge that voter information is being analyzed through an immigration-status database can also create a chilling effect, causing some citizens to decide that registering or voting is too risky for their household. And once federal agencies centralize voter data, there is a dangerous risk of mission creep. What begins as “voter verification” today could be expanded later to background checks, travel screening, benefit investigations, or other government systems setting a precedent for federal data use the public never agreed to.
On November 18, 2025, secretaries of state from ten states sent a formal letter demanding answers about whether they were misled regarding these data transfers, and calling for full transparency about which records were shared, what information was included, which agencies accessed it, and under what legal authority these actions were taken.
Americans deserve to know whether their personal voter information was swept into a federal immigration database, why the purpose of the data collection changed, and what protections will be put in place to prevent wrongful voter purges, investigations, or intimidation. The right to vote means nothing if citizens can be silenced by database errors, federal overreach, or fear.
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