The Department of Justice has now asked 48 states and Washington DC for complete voter registration lists1. Twenty-nine states and DC refused and were subsequently sued. In court, a DOJ official admitted the department plans to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security to run through the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system to screen for non-citizens2.
Three courts (California, Michigan, Oregon) have explicitly rejected DOJ's claims to unredacted voter files. Seventeen mostly Republican-led states complied. The DOJ invokes the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to assert authority over election records, a legal theory that, if upheld, would grant broad federal access to state election infrastructure. The statute was designed to protect minority voting rights; the DOJ is repurposing it to demand voter data that civil rights organisations argue would be used to suppress minority registration.
This is the infrastructure beneath the headline executive order. The EO directs DHS and SSA to compile citizenship lists for gating USPS ballot delivery. The DOJ voter data campaign builds the database that infrastructure requires. Though courts have blocked seven EO provisions, the DOJ's affirmative litigation to obtain voter data continues on a separate legal track, constructing the very database the blocked provisions were designed to populate.
