More than two dozen Senate Democrats are calling on the Justice Department to stop “its intensifying pressure campaign to coerce states into handing over their voter rolls.”
The senators wrote a letter today to Attorney General Pam Bondi, days after she sent Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz a letter seeking his state’s voter rolls amid the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement actions in the state.
“We strongly oppose the Department’s lawsuits against states, which are unauthorized attempts to centralize this data, that in addition to posing serious risks to voter privacy, data security, and national security, also invite unwarranted voter roll purges and undermine state and local election officials’ list maintenance efforts,” said the letter, spearheaded by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Alex Padilla, D-Calif.
The DOJ has sued about two dozen states and Washington, D.C., for failing to produce their voter registration lists upon request,” the letter said. At least eight states, meanwhile, have handed over their complete lists of registered voters to the federal government, it said.
The senators wrote that the DOJ has not provided Congress and the public information on how it’s maintaining voter data and how it’s being used. They submitted a series of detailed questions about these efforts in the letter and asked that the administration respond by Feb. 12. They also requested a briefing on the issue.
The letter comes a day after the FBI executed a search warrant at a Fulton County, Georgia, election hub seeking files related to the 2020 presidential election.