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Trump’s DOJ is building a voter purge machine—powered by your private data

motherjones.com · last updated December 5, 2025 – 11:43 PM

<div> <div>Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/newsletters/?mj_oac=Article_Top_No_Oligarch… up for the free Mother Jones Daily.</a></div> It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list. While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new, what the federal government sought through <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1414286/dl?inline">the lawsuit</a>—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file—was not. Bellows, a spunky, no-nonsense 50-year-old who grew up in a log cabin <a href="https://medium.com/@press_76607/im-shenna-bellows-and-i-m-running-for-g… running water,</a> already had received a litany of demand letters, public records requests, and lawsuits throughout her five years serving as the top election integrity official in Maine. Citing the National Voter Registration Act, most of the requests for the state’s voter data had the ostensible aim of ensuring Maine was adequately removing the names of individuals who should not be on the voter roll. But this lawsuit was the first of its kind from the government itself. The <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1414286/dl?inline">September legal complaint</a> was an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/dhs-gathering-drivers-lice… roll data</a> from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections. In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/republican-national-commit… groups</a> like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country. <blockquote>“The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government.”</blockquote> “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government,” says Bellows, who spent eight years as the executive director of the Maine ACLU before assuming her current post. “These requests are not unlike the requests that the organizations they used to be affiliated with have asked for years.” But unlike conservative legal organizations, she adds, “the Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.” Riordan and Dhillon have been pursuing Maine’s voter information since July, when the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent Bellows a <a href="https://mainemorningstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/DOJLetter.pdf">…; requesting the state’s unredacted registration list. Bellows wrote a careful <a href="https://mainemorningstar.com/briefs/here-is-the-official-letter-secreta…; referencing federal court opinions and state statutes that preclude her from sharing the voter roll without appropriate redactions. In return, the DOJ sent her another <a href="https://www.maine.gov/sos/sites/maine.gov.sos/files/inline-files/DOJ%20… letter</a>, followed by the ironically timed lawsuit on National Voter Registration Day. Maine isn’t the only state the DOJ contacted. Over the last six months, it has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/tracker-justice… of states</a> in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics. The DOJ has formally sued <a href="https://stateline.org/2025/12/03/justice-department-sues-6-more-states-… states</a> for the data so far, 12 of which are led by Democrats. (The sole exceptions are Vermont, which has a Republican governor but is otherwise deeply blue, and New Hampshire, where Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has publicly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMlDEm0Bg_M">disagreed</a> with President Donald Trump’s plan to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterms to give Republicans more seats.) Bellows believes Maine was among the first two states to be sued “because of animus”—also known as old-fashioned retribution. The Justice Department already has tried to retaliate against Trump’s political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over allegations that he inflated the value of his real estate holdings. (A federal judge recently <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/judge-dismisses-cas…; both indictments, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-doj-weighs-ch…; weighing whether to re-indict them.) Bellows, though lesser known, is likely on the administration’s radar for other reasons, too. Citing the 14th Amendment’s clause barring officials who “engage in” insurrection from holding future office, she <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/28/politics/trump-maine-14th-amendment-ball… to remove</a> Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot based on his connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. But Bellows, who is now running for governor, may not be the only one harmed by the DOJ data grab and the spurious claims supporting it. In 2024, crude analyses of voter roll data by right wingers led election officials in <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/03/24/overseas-vot… Township, Michigan</a>, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/10/29/nx-s1-5169204/virginia-noncitizen-voter-…; to remove duly registered voters from the rolls. So far, challenges like these have taken place on a much smaller scale: state by state or even county by county. The DOJ’s current effort to assemble every state’s voter data poses an exponentially larger threat to voting rights. More than a dozen state election officials, former DOJ staff, and election experts told Mother Jones that a national database of voter registration information could lead to massive data breaches of Americans’ private information and reinforce false narratives about the frequency of voter fraud—narratives Trump and his allies could weaponize to challenge election outcomes. Worse yet, the bad data could give Republican-led states cover to illegally cull eligible voters from their rolls, stopping certain people from voting at all. “These unprecedented demands for vast amounts of voter data are part of a larger pattern of actions indicating a reckless grab for power over American elections,” Bellows says. It could also lead to a vast expansion of the number of citizens who appear on Trump’s hit list—one that, depending on your personal data, may soon include you. <img width="150" src="https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/20251203_doj_sec…; alt="A decorative image of numbers and data from the top illustration."> The right-wing campaign to weaponize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which former Attorney General Eric Holder once <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/speech/attorney-general-eric-holde…; the “crown jewel” of the department, dates back more than two decades. After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, National Review called for a <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/justice-bush-style/">radical restructuring</a> of the division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” wrote national correspondent John J. Miller. “Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers.” <blockquote>“My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.”</blockquote> And a year later, that’s precisely what they did. Attorney General John Ashcroft tapped Brad Schlozman, a Kansas-based lawyer with no prior civil rights litigation experience, as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. His responsibilities included overseeing hiring and supervision for the division’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws. Schlozman did little to <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/trumps-election-commission… his disdain</a> for the section he now led. “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he wrote to a former colleague in July 2003. Schlozman embarked on a hiring spree of what he called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/washington/14justice.html">RTAs</a>,” short for “right-thinking Americans,” recruiting lawyers from the Federalist Society, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and the Bush-Cheney campaign. A joint <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1206591/dl?inline">investigation<…; by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that “virtually all of the attorneys (97 percent) hired by Schlozman whose political and ideological affiliations were evident in the hiring process were Republican or conservative.” Veteran civil rights lawyers with decades of experience began <a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/4946744">leaving in droves</a>, including the well-respected chief of the voting section, Joe Rich. Schlozman made Hans von Spakovsky, who had been among the first major figures in the GOP to push the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/29/the-voter-fraud-myth">myth of widespread voter fraud</a>, de facto head of the section. Soon, the department’s political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve GOP-backed laws that were regarded as racially discriminatory, including a mid-decade congressional <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10411917">redistricting plan in Texas</a> that eliminated two majority-minority districts and a <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/20/ari_berman_supreme_court_pick_ne… voter ID law</a> that disproportionately harmed Black voters. <img width="1300" src="https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Plunkert-voter-p…; alt="An illustration shows a blue-faced man being squeezed and flattened by a network of gray mechanical rollers and black wires. The man is attempting to put a ballot in a ballot box.">David Plunkert “You take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States,” Robert Kengle, the deputy chief of the voting section from 1999 to 2005, told Mother Jones’ Ari Berman in his 2015 book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/85492/9781250094728">Give Us the Ballot</a>. “These guys didn’t believe in the laws of the United States. They came in to work for an institution for which they had the utmost contempt.” One of the attorneys hired by Schlozman was J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner in Virginia who had served as a Bush-Cheney poll watcher in Florida. Rich <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/j-christian-adams/who-j-christian-adams#ac… him</a> as “Exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman.” Adams helped bring the DOJ’s first-ever Voting Rights Act case on behalf of white voters, who claimed they were discriminated against by the Black head of the local Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Career lawyers viewed it as a <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/the-three-lawyers-whove-pu… of the law</a>, which was intended to protect Black voters who were disenfranchised by segregationist whites in states like Mississippi. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the DOJ’s inspector general <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1206591/dl?inline">found</a> that Schlozman had violated federal law and committed misconduct by “improperly [considering] political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.” But the anti-voting positions of the likes of von Spakovsky and Adams had already become institutionalized and were spreading within the GOP. A couple of years later, in 2010, Adams loudly accused the Obama administration of <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/j-christian-adams/who-j-christian-adams#ac… bias</a> when the DOJ dropped a case he spearheaded alleging that white voters were intimidated at the polls in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party. An internal review found <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/03/29/134962673/justice-de… evidence</a> of improper political interference, but by this point, Adams had resigned in protest. He would go on to become head of the right-wing legal group PILF in 2015. In addition to filing lawsuits against local jurisdictions to force them to <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/lawyer-behind-nationwide-v… voters from their rolls</a>, PILF published two reports in 2016 and 2017, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” that sought to validate Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The reports, which included names, addresses, and private information like Social Security numbers, claimed that more than 5,500 noncitizens had registered to vote in Virginia and 1,852 people had cast nearly 7,500 illegal ballots since the late 1980s. “This is the real foreign influence on American elections,” Adams told Fox News. “Foreigners are getting on American voter rolls and, as we documented, casting ballots by the thousands.”PILF called on the Justice Department to bring felony charges against the voters it identified. Republican political activists drew up plans to post signs at polling places warning of voter fraud, which Adams said should be “in Spanish” to be “effective.”It soon became clear, however, that PILF had relied on faulty methodology. As <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/trump-election-commissione… Jones previously reported,</a> “Alien Invasion II” spotlighted the “astonishing” example of one voter, Maureen Erickson, who listed a Guatemalan address on her registration form. “Ms. Erickson voted in 14 different elections—most recently in 2008—before her registration was canceled,” the report stated.But it turned out that Erickson was a US citizen living in Guatemala as a missionary. “I think it is odd that they chose ‘Maureen Erickson’ as their poster child for voter fraud,” her husband, Todd Erickson, wrote in a letter to the Washington Times after it picked up the story. “There was obviously not much additional research done on the person that they held up as an example of this illegal activity.”When Virginia election officials warned PILF that it was using <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/trump-election-commissione… data</a>—such as targeting individuals who did not check a citizenship box at the DMV—to identify “suspected aliens,” PILF staffer Logan Churchwell agreed in an <a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6200396/188-3-REDACTED-1.pdf">em… to Adams</a> that their concerns could “be true.” But this was an opportunity, Churchwell said, to “convert pushback into official confusion to justify our call for a top-down overhaul.”“The fog of war favors the aggressor here,” added Churchwell, who remains research director at PILF.In 2018, four Virginia voters whom PILF falsely accused of voting illegally <a href="https://southerncoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/LULAC-of-Richm… a lawsuit</a> against Adams and PILF, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—which empowers individuals to sue when vigilante groups threaten their 14th Amendment rights—through “a modern, covert, and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.” PILF <a href="https://southerncoalition.org/voters-strike-back-and-win-settlement-in-… the case</a> before it went to trial, with Adams agreeing to apologize to the plaintiffs and PILF pledging to redact sensitive personal information.The reports should have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of overhyped fraud claims and the misuse of sensitive voter information, but Trump and his allies were undeterred and determined to spread such misinformation to a much bigger audience.</div>

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Trump’s DOJ is building a voter purge machine—powered by your private data

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