Overview
- Voting advocates led by ACLU, CREW, Protect Democracy, and Common Cause filed the case Tuesday in Washington, asking a judge to stop DOJ from using state voter lists, to delete data already taken, and to halt any sharing of it outside the department.
- DOJ last year sought unredacted rolls that include addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers, and an official said the agency has reviewed about 60 million records while flagging possible matches for dead voters and non‑citizens.
- The department has sued roughly 30 states and Washington, D.C., to compel access, but federal judges in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island dismissed some cases for lack of legal basis.
- At least 12 states have provided data, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas, with reports that more may follow.
- The lawsuit warns of wrongful purges from error‑prone checks using DHS’s SAVE database and cites Texas voter Anthony Nel, a naturalized citizen who was removed after a non‑citizen flag, as proof of the risk to eligible voters’ rights and privacy.