The Trump administration has been engaged in numerous legal battles so that it can obtain and properly vet America’s voter rolls.
Dozens of states are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep the Dept. of Homeland Security and the Dept. of Justice from flagging non-citizens who are not eligible to vote in federal elections.
But many of these states had no problem participating in a system that supplied sensitive motor-vehicle information to a private nonprofit network involved in identifying eligible but unregistered voters.
That disconnect is drawing new scrutiny after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC, improperly disclosed protected motor-vehicle information to activist organizations.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against 30 states and Washington, D.C., seeking complete statewide voter-registration lists. The requested records can contain information unavailable on public voter files, including birth dates, addresses, partial Social Security numbers and driver's-license numbers.
The administration says it needs the information to determine whether states are properly maintaining voter rolls under federal election laws, including the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act.
DOJ also argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives the attorney general broad authority to inspect statewide voter-registration records. Many states refuse to comply.
Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania were among six states sued by the Justice Department in September 2025 after refusing to produce the requested statewide lists. Massachusetts was subsequently sued as part of another round of litigation.
Those five states have something else in common: They have participated in ERIC, the interstate “nonprofit” created to help states compare voter-registration and motor-vehicle records.
ERIC's operation depends on states supplying information from their own government databases. Member states provide voter-registration information along with motor-vehicle licensing and identification records.
ERIC uses the data for several purposes, including identifying duplicate registrations, voters who have moved and deceased voters.
But ERIC also produces what it calls Eligible But Unregistered, or EBU, reports. It compares voter-registration records with Motor Vehicle Department data and identifies people who have a driver's license or state identification card but don't appear on the voter-registration list.
States can then use other government records to filter the resulting list before sending registration information to people believed to be eligible.
In 2020 alone, ERIC's system identified more than 17 million potentially eligible but unregistered people across participating states, according to records reviewed in the DHS investigation.
So, why the double standard? Blue states will send “sensitive” voter data to an activist group network but not to their own federal government?
According to Mullin's September 2 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, sensitive motor-vehicle information provided by states to ERIC was subsequently shared with at least one other private organization: the Center for Election Innovation and Research, or CEIR.
The relationship between the organizations is eyebrow-raising.
David Becker helped establish ERIC and later founded CEIR. In 2020, CEIR became one of the nonprofit organizations that received enormous financial support from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, for election-related activities.
CEIR says it distributed nearly $65 million to 23 states for voter-education efforts during the 2020 election, with the money supplied by Zuckerberg and Chan. CEIR describes those programs as nonpartisan efforts designed to give voters accurate information about registration, voting methods, polling places and deadlines.
But DHS is now asking a different question: What data moved between the states, ERIC and CEIR in carrying out some of that work?
Mullin's letter specifically points to Pennsylvania. The Keystone State received roughly $13 million from CEIR in 2020. According to the DHS letter, the grant agreement required the state to “cooperate with CEIR, including providing data, as CEIR reasonably requests.”
DHS says the information requested included state motor-vehicle data originally supplied to ERIC and used in connection with producing EBU lists for outreach.
That raises a significant issue under the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act.
The DPPA generally restricts the disclosure and use of personal information obtained through state motor-vehicle agencies, subject to a series of statutory exceptions. Mullin is asking DOJ to determine whether the sharing and resharing of information through the nonprofit network fell within one of those permitted uses.
“This sharing and resharing of Motor Vehicle Agency data among NGOs may not qualify as a permissible use of motor-vehicle data identified in the DPPA,” Mullin wrote.
The secretary also noted the political value of such information: “This category of data regarding potential voters is incredibly valuable to political parties and campaigns.”
ERIC disputes allegations that it violated the law. Its current public materials also say the EBU reports supplied to member states do not themselves contain Social Security numbers, driver's-license numbers or state identification numbers. Instead, according to ERIC, the reports contain limited information necessary to identify and contact potentially eligible residents.
But the DHS inquiry concerns the underlying motor-vehicle information supplied by states and how that information may have moved through the system — particularly in connection with CEIR.
States participating in this voter data system have simultaneously been fighting the federal government's attempts to obtain unredacted voter-registration records.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said his state wanted assurances from DOJ that residents' Social Security and driver's-license information would be protected before turning it over. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has similarly opposed federal access to sensitive voter information.
And the states have had considerable success in court keeping their voter rolls hidden from the federal government.
As of August 17, federal judges had rejected the Trump administration's demands in 23 cases, including lawsuits involving Michigan, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. DOJ has appealed many of those decisions. The Sixth Circuit has already upheld the dismissal of the government's case seeking Michigan's voter information.
The administration, however, has not abandoned its legal argument.
In May, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Civil Rights Act authorizes DOJ to compel states to produce statewide voter-registration lists and permits the department to share those records with Homeland Security for comparison against federal databases. That is the administration's legal position; multiple federal
If sensitive state-held information could legally be supplied to private organizations for voter-registration and election-related activities, what precisely made those disclosures permissible?
Who received the underlying information? What restrictions governed its use? And were those restrictions actually followed?
Those questions are salient given the sheer scale of the 2020 operation.
Zuckerberg and Chan contributed roughly $400 million to election-related nonprofits during the 2020 cycle, principally CEIR and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTLC). CEIR's share financed voter-education programs in nearly two dozen states.
The new DHS inquiry adds a different dimension to the long-running controversy over that private election funding.
For years, states supplied motor-vehicle and voter information to ERIC as part of an interstate data-sharing program. That information helped produce lists identifying millions of potentially eligible but unregistered Americans.
DHS now wants DOJ to determine whether protected motor-vehicle information was subsequently shared with another privately funded election nonprofit in violation of federal privacy law.
At the same time, states involved in that system are telling the federal government that some of their voter information is simply too sensitive to hand over.
Here is the biggest question: Why are states hiding voter roll data from the federal government, when they are already handing data over to election activist groups?
