Trump voter data push prompts privacy concerns

Source: Roll Call

Posted January 2, 2026 at 6:30am


The Trump administration has spent months on a campaign to collect nonpublic voter data from nearly every state, facing pushback from states and concerns from privacy advocates.

President Donald Trump and Justice Department officials have cast the effort as a push to clamp down on alleged voting fraud, amid a broader Trump administration effort to collect data about Americans. Justice Department officials contend that the requests to states, and the lawsuits the government has filed against those who haven’t turned over the voter information, are needed to keep American elections secure.

“Clean voter rolls protect American citizens from voting fraud and abuse, and restore their confidence that their states’ elections are conducted properly, with integrity, and in compliance with the law,” Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division, said when announcing several lawsuits against states.

Frank Torres, a civil rights and technology fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that “people are alarmed and more ought to be alarmed by this” effort, saying the Justice Department is compiling a “de facto national citizenship database.” Torres said he and others are concerned that the Trump administration will use the data to attempt to feed into a system like SAVE, administered by the Department of Homeland Security to try to find noncitizens or otherwise ineligible registered voters.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2026/01/02/trump-voter-data-push-prompts-privacy-concerns/