- United States
- Texas
- Letter
Stop the Department of Justice from sharing state voter registration data with the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has no legal authority over elections, and this data transfer violates federal privacy laws.
The DOJ has collected sensitive voter information from 17 states, including driver's license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses, without issuing required public notices or privacy assessments. Justin Levitt, former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has stated that each of these 17 state voter rolls represents "a criminal violation." Federal judges in California, Oregon, and Michigan have already dismissed DOJ's demands, with U.S. District Judge David Carter ruling that the requests violated federal and state privacy laws.
The DOJ now plans to run this data through DHS's SAVE system. At a Rhode Island hearing, DOJ's Eric Neff admitted he couldn't promise what other agencies would do with the data. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, voters flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens are referred to ICE for investigation. This creates a direct pipeline from voter rolls to immigration enforcement.
The DOJ's chief FOIA officer and senior privacy official in the Civil Rights Division, Kilian Kagle, just resigned over this issue. Block this unlawful data sharing immediately and demand DOJ delete all improperly collected voter data.