NEW YORK — The requests have come in letters, emails and phone calls. The specifics vary, but the target is consistent: The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up an effort to get voter data and other election information from the states.
Over the past three months, the department’s voting section has requested copies of voter registration lists from state election administrators in at least 15 states, according to an Associated Press tally. Of those, nine are Democrats, five are Republicans and one is a bipartisan commission.
In Colorado, the department demanded “all records” relating to the 2024 election and any records the state retained from the 2020 election.
Department lawyers have contacted officials in at least seven states to propose a meeting about forging an information-sharing agreement related to instances of voting or election fraud. The idea, they say in the emails, is for states to help the department enforce the law.
The unusually expansive outreach has raised alarm among some election officials because states have the constitutional authority to run elections and federal law protects the sharing of individual data with the government.
It also signals the transformation of the Justice Department’s involvement in elections under President Donald Trump. The department historically has focused on protecting access to the ballot box. Today, it is taking steps to crack down on voter fraud and noncitizen voting, both of which are rare but have been the subject of years of false claims from Trump and his allies.
The department’s actions come alongside a broader effort by the administration to investigate past elections and influence the 2026 midterms. The Republican president has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and continues to falsely claim he won. Trump also has pushed Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional maps to create more House seats favorable to the GOP.
The Justice Department does not typically “engage in fishing expeditions” to find laws that may potentially have been broken and has traditionally been independent from the president, said David Becker, a former department lawyer who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“Now it seems to be operating differently,” he said.
The department responded with an emailed “no comment” to a list of questions submitted by the AP seeking details about the communications with state officials.
Requests to states vary and some are specific
Election offices in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Utah, and Wisconsin confirmed that they received letters from the voting section requesting their statewide voter registration lists. At least one other, Oklahoma, received the request by phone.
Many requests included basic questions about the procedures states use to comply with federal voting laws, such as how states identify and remove duplicate voter registrations or deceased or otherwise ineligible voters.
Certain questions were more state-specific and referenced data points or perceived inconsistencies from a recent survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an review of several of the letters showed.
The Justice Department already has filed suit against the state election board in North Carolina alleging it failed to comply with a part of the federal Help America Vote Act that relates to voter registration records.
More inquiries are likely on the way
There are signs the department’s outreach isn’t done. It told the National Association of Secretaries of State that “all states would be contacted eventually,” said Maria Benson, a NASS spokeswoman.
The organization has asked the department to join a virtual meeting of its elections committee to answer questions about the letters, Benson said. Some officials have raised concerns about how the voter data will be used and protected.
Election officials in at least four California counties — Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and San Francisco —said the Justice Department sent them letters asking for voter roll records. The letters asked for the number of people removed from the rolls for being noncitizens and for their voting records, dates of birth and ID numbers.
Officials in Arizona, Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wisconsin confirmed to the AP that they received an email from two department lawyers requesting a call about a potential “information-sharing agreement.”
The goal, according to several copies of the emails reviewed, was for states to provide the government with information about instances of election fraud to help the Justice Department “enforce Federal election laws and protect the integrity of Federal elections.” One of those sending the emails was a senior counsel in the criminal division.
The emails referred to Trump’s March executive order on elections, part of which directs the attorney general to enter information-sharing agreements with state election officials to the “maximum extent possible.”
