DOJ Misled Court On Voter Data Analysis, Top Official Admits
Last week, during a Rhode Island court hearing centered on the Trump administration’s push to gain access to the state’s full unredacted voter rolls, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy posed a sharp question to a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney: what had the agency done with the voter roll data it had already collected from dozens of other states over the prior months?
“We have not done anything yet,” replied Eric Neff, acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section — a core unit within the department’s Civil Rights Division focused on upholding federal voting rights protections. Neff added that the sensitive voter information the DOJ had gathered from states, which can include Social Security numbers, driver’s license details, dates of birth, and residential addresses, was all stored in isolated, separate datasets.
He went on to add that the U.S. government was taking extraordinary precautions to ensure full compliance with the Privacy Act in every possible respect. The 1974 Privacy Act sets binding regulations for how federal agencies can collect and use personal identifiable information about U.S. residents.
But Neff’s original statement was not true. He later acknowledged that the DOJ had already begun combining the collected data and running analyses to flag purported voting irregularities. In a court filing submitted on March 27, Neff walked back his earlier claims: “The United States represented that each data set was stored separately. The United States also stated that no analysis had yet been conducted on the data. To correct and clarify the record, preliminary internal data analysis of the nonpublic voter registration data has begun. In particular, the Civil Rights Division has begun the process of identifying and quantifying the number and type of duplicate and deceased registered voters in each state.”
The correction confirms what election observers have long speculated: the DOJ is building a centralized cross-state voter dataset to search for supposed voting irregularities ahead of the midterm elections, a core pillar of Donald Trump’s broader unfounded attacks on U.S. election integrity. Neff and the DOJ have not responded to repeated requests for comment on the incident.
Critics have grown increasingly alarmed by the dramatic overhaul of the DOJ’s Voting Section during the Trump administration. A newly installed cohort of inexperienced but deeply loyal lawyers, many of whom have backed election denial conspiracy theories, have centered their work on coercing states to hand over full voter roll data.
The push launched in May of last year, when the DOJ sent formal letters to election officials in at least 48 states and Washington, D.C., requesting unredacted voter rolls. A small number of Republican-led states complied immediately, but dozens of others rejected the request. In response, Neff and his team have filed lawsuits against 30 states, asking courts to force compliance. To date, courts have mostly sided with states, with judges already dismissing DOJ lawsuits in California, Michigan, and Oregon.
In many of these legal battles, state election officials have warned that sharing such sensitive personal data carries enormous security risks, especially since the DOJ has never clearly explained how the data will be stored or who will access it. “We still have no idea what the government is doing with this data,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former DOJ attorney. “No idea where it is being stored, how it is being protected, or who has access to it. This data is incredibly sensitive. If someone has any of these three data points on any of us — Social Security number, driver's license number, or date of birth — they can ruin us financially. This is why the states protect this data, and they do a good job of it.”
The DOJ has refused to share its exact end goal for the collected data, though it has repeatedly claimed the information will not be used to build a national voter database. That denial came just as Trump signed an executive order this week requiring the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create a national voter database as part of a broader effort to restrict access to mail-in voting. During his Rhode Island court appearance, Neff did acknowledge that the DOJ would be willing to share its collected data with DHS.
Neff told the court that 17 states have already handed over unredacted voter rolls to the DOJ, but he declined to name the complying states. A public tracker maintained by the Brennan Center for Justice reports that only 12 states have publicly confirmed they have complied with the request.
It remains unclear whether Neff intentionally misled the court, or if he was simply unaware of the ongoing data work despite his role as acting chief of the Voting Section. Either outcome raises serious concerns, experts say. “Assuming Neff’s not knowingly lying in court, and the fact is that he's clueless about what's happening, the problem with that is, as a DOJ lawyer, you are charged with knowing these things, you are charged with going into court prepared,” Becker explained. “It is a reflection of the DOJ's rejection of experience and lawyering skill, in favor of loyalty.”
Most state election officials continue to push back against the DOJ’s effort to access the highly sensitive voter data, and that resistance shows no sign of fading. “My answer to the voter roll demands is that they'll have to pry it out of my hands,” one anonymous state election director, who declined to be named over fears of retaliation from the Trump administration, told WIRED this week. “There's absolutely no way I’ll comply, because I took an oath of office to protect the voters of this state, and I intend to do just that.”
