The Trump administration’s use of voter data
<div> <p><span>The Justice Department is compiling the biggest set of national voter roll data it's ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that many undocumented immigrants have voted illegally, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/us/politics/trump-voter-registration… New York Times</a> reports.</span></p> <p><span>The effort to essentially establish a national voting database, involving more than 30 states, has elicited concerns among voting rights experts because it's led by allies of the president, who as recently as this January refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election, the Times says.</span></p> <p><span>And it’s raised concerns that those same officials could use the data to revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results, the Times says.</span></p> <p><span>The Justice Department has requested data from at least 16 Republican-controlled states and sent more formal demands for data to at least 17 mostly Democrat-controlled or swing states, according to the Times.</span></p> <p><span>Nearly every state has resisted turning over voter files with private, personally identifiable information on voters such as driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers, says the Times. Last week, a local judge blocked South Carolina from releasing private voter information to the Justice Department.</span></p> <p><span>“Studies and state audits have found that noncitizen voting is essentially nonexistent,” says the Times.</span></p> <p><span>Meanwhile <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/09/10/nx-s1-5477367/save-election-citizenship-…; reports that tens of millions of voters have had their citizenship status and other information checked using a revamped tool offered by the Trump administration that many states led by Democrats and Republicans are refusing or hesitating to use.</span></p> <p><span>U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says election officials have used the tool to check the information of more than 33 million voters, even though little information has been made public about the tool's accuracy or data security.</span></p>
<p><br><span>The latest update to the system, known as SAVE, took effect Aug. 15 and allows election officials to use the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers — along with names and dates of birth — to check if the voters are U.S. citizens, or if they’ve died.</span></p>
<p><br><span>The Department of Homeland Security, which houses USCIS, hasn't responded to questions about the system from members of Congress, and numerous election officials NPR spoke with expressed concern about what else the Trump administration could do with the data it acquires from states.</span></p> </div>