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On January 25, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz demanding the state’s voter registration files—including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and full birthdates. She wasn’t asking for public records. She was demanding information that most states explicitly protect from public disclosure under their own privacy laws. She sent it on the same day that federal immigration agents killed a civilian in Minneapolis.
The timing wasn’t coincidental. Minnesota officials describe the letter as part of a coordinated pressure campaign: comply with federal demands for voter data and welfare records, or face continued federal immigration enforcement operations in the state. Minnesota’s attorneys called it “a shakedown letter” in federal court. Representative Ilhan Omar put it more bluntly: “ICE will leave Minnesota if you hand over your voter rolls tells you everything you need to know.”
What Registration Files Contain
When you register to vote, you provide your state with extensive personal details: full name, residential address, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license number, phone number, email address, and in many states, party affiliation. Election officials need this information to verify eligibility, prevent duplicate registrations, and maintain accurate rolls.
States don’t make all of that public. Most maintain two versions: a public version with basic identifying details and addresses, and a master version with the sensitive stuff. The public version serves legitimate purposes—campaigns use it to contact people, journalists use it to verify election administration practices, watchdog groups use it to ensure states aren’t improperly removing eligible people. The master version, with Social Security numbers and full birthdates, stays locked down.
Minnesota follows this two-track approach. The state provides restricted access to publicly available records while keeping the database—the one Bondi wants—limited to election officials and specific law enforcement purposes under state law.
Social Security numbers combined with birthdates and addresses create identity theft risk. Driver’s license numbers can facilitate fraud. Party affiliation tied to home addresses could enable political retaliation. Some people—domestic violence survivors, law enforcement officers, judges—have legitimate safety reasons to keep their addresses confidential.
The Federal Authority Question
Bondi’s letter claims authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, specifically Title III. That law allows the Attorney General to request records “relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting.” The statute includes a requirement: the attorney general must provide “the basis and the purpose” for any such request.
Three federal judges have ruled that the Justice Department hasn’t met that standard.
In December 2025, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter rejected the DOJ’s attempt to compel California to turn over its records. His 33-page opinion stated: “The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left. The case before the Court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans.”
Judge Carter found that the Justice Department had failed to provide specific evidence of any violations of federal election law by California. Instead, the DOJ offered only general assertions about “compliance verification.” The court found this insufficient to justify demands for the sensitive personal details of 23 million California residents.
“It appears that the DOJ is on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database,” Judge Carter wrote. Creating such a database would create “a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose.”
Federal judges in Oregon and Georgia have signaled similar skepticism. The Oregon judge indicated from the bench he was inclined to dismiss the case. The Georgia judge dismissed on jurisdictional grounds—the government had filed in the wrong district.
The Constitutional Architecture
The deeper issue involves Article II of the Constitution, which gives states the power to run elections. States run elections, but Congress can set federal rules that override state rules. This creates a careful balance between state and federal power: states run elections, Congress can set minimum standards, and the executive branch—the Justice Department—can only do what Congress has explicitly allowed it to do.
A federal law requires states to publicly show which voters were added or removed from rolls—specifically, documentation of list maintenance activities. The statute doesn’t explicitly require states to provide unredacted records to federal officials. Another federal law requires states to keep voter lists accurate, yet it contains no provision mandating wholesale transfer of sensitive data to the federal government.
When federal judges have examined these statutes, they’ve concluded that Congress didn’t authorize what the Justice Department is demanding. The President and Justice Department can only do what Congress has authorized them to do.
The 2017 Precedent
This isn’t the Trump administration’s first attempt to collect state records. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence chaired a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach running day-to-day operations. Kobach sent letters to all fifty states requesting data, giving them two weeks to comply.
Forty-four states and the District of Columbia refused. Not blue states alone—red states too. Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, told the commission they could “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows noted pointedly that “The Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail”—an implicit warning about what could happen if sensitive data fell into the wrong hands.
The commission disbanded in January 2018 without issuing a final report. Trump ordered all collected state data destroyed. It had failed because it lacked legal authority to compel states, and states across the political spectrum viewed the demands as exceeding federal power.
The current situation differs in one critical respect: Bondi isn’t running an advisory commission. She’s the Attorney General with the full prosecutorial power of the Justice Department behind her. She’s already sued more than two dozen states that refused to comply.
The Noncitizen Voting Claim
The Trump administration justifies its demands for data by claiming widespread noncitizen voting threatens election integrity. The evidence doesn’t support this narrative.
The Heritage Foundation’s database of proven fraud cases—maintained by a conservative organization looking for such cases—documents 68 instances of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Across more than a billion votes cast over that period, that’s approximately 0.0001 percent.
A 2017 Brennan Center analysis examined 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 election and found noncitizens were referred for investigation in 30 cases. Again: 0.0001 percent. A Georgia investigation covering 1997 to 2022 identified 1,634 noncitizens who attempted to register—and nearly all were blocked after election officials discovered they lacked citizenship and requested proof.
All states prohibit noncitizen voting. Federal law imposes up to five years in prison and potential deportation for noncitizens who vote. Most documented cases involve individuals who were mistakenly encouraged to vote by government officials, operated under false identities, or were lawful permanent residents who incorrectly believed themselves to be citizens.
The SAVE System’s Accuracy Problem
A related concern involves how the administration plans to use data once it obtains it. The Department of Homeland Security operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, originally designed to verify citizenship status for federal benefit purposes. The Trump administration has repurposed SAVE to match rolls against immigration databases and identify potential noncitizens registered to vote.
The system relies on multiple federal databases—Social Security Administration records, State Department visa records, FBI databases, Department of Homeland Security immigration records. These databases aren’t complete, aren’t regularly updated to include all naturalized citizens, and contain errors and outdated records.
In Texas, which voluntarily submitted records to SAVE for verification, at least 15 of 84 people flagged as noncitizens were false positives. These were American citizens incorrectly identified as noncitizens by the federal database.
Once removed from rolls based on false identification of noncitizen status, citizens may not realize they’ve been purged until they attempt to vote. At that point they face provisional ballots that might not be counted, or being turned away from polls altogether.
Federal Senators Alex Padilla, Gary Peters, and Jeff Merkley have expressed concerns to DHS about using SAVE for verification without adequate safeguards: “There are concerns that data quality issues may cause state and local officials who rely on the program to receive false positives or incomplete results. This means state and local officials must take on additional burdens to verify SAVE’s results and to ensure that eligible Americans are not denied their right to cast a ballot.”
The Cybersecurity Stakes
Centralizing sensitive records creates risks that election officials and cybersecurity experts have repeatedly flagged.
A centralized database containing Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and full birthdates for tens of millions of Americans would represent an extraordinary target for criminal hackers and foreign adversaries. A single successful breach could expose millions to identity theft and financial fraud on a massive scale.
When a private advocacy organization published data from Virginia in 2016 and 2017, including in some cases Social Security numbers, it demonstrated how easily sensitive records could be weaponized once extracted from state control. Only after legal action did the organization remove the data.
Federal investigators discovered in 2025 that two members of the Department of Government Efficiency team at the Social Security Administration may have handed over Americans’ personal details to an advocacy group working to “overturn election results in certain states.” The Justice Department recommended prosecution of those officials.
Where the State Stands
Secretary of State Steve Simon has stated his office is prepared to go to court rather than comply with Bondi’s demands. “The law does not give the federal government the authority to obtain this private data,” Simon said in response to the letter. “It is deeply disturbing that the U.S. Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
Federal courts have already ruled against the Justice Department in similar cases, which supports Minnesota’s argument. Those rulings provide substantial support for the argument that the Justice Department hasn’t articulated sufficient legal basis for demanding unredacted records, and that doing so would exceed congressional authorization.
The state can point to its own privacy laws that specifically protect sensitive records. State law provides that Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and full birthdates are confidential and not part of the public record. State law limits access to master databases to officials with election administration responsibilities. Complying with federal demands would require the state to violate its own laws protecting privacy.
Yet the state also faces risks. Litigation costs money. If the administration prosecutes state election officials, Minnesota faces difficult political and legal problems. If the Trump administration threatens to withhold federal funding or impose other sanctions, the state might face difficult choices about the cost of continued resistance.
The 2026 Context
Since May 2025, the Justice Department has demanded records from at least 44 states and Washington, D.C., and has sued more than two dozen jurisdictions that refused. These demands have been mostly aimed at states that went for Biden in 2020 and are currently governed by Democrats.
For the 2026 midterm elections, this pattern takes on particular significance. Minnesota is a closely contested state where control of Senate and House seats could determine control of Congress. If federal authorities could access and manipulate the state’s records, or spread unfounded claims about noncitizen voting, it could depress turnout or enable challenges to election outcomes based on fabricated evidence.
The Constitutional Question
The immediate question for people in Minnesota is whether the personal details they provided when registering will be protected from federal access and potential misuse. The broader question affects all Americans: will elections continue to be administered primarily by states, as the Constitution envisioned, or will the federal government take control of elections instead?
Minnesota’s resistance, backed by federal courts and election officials from both parties, reflects a consensus that data privacy must be protected and that federal authority over elections must remain bounded by law. Secretary of State Simon has made clear that the state will not voluntarily surrender protected records, and the state appears prepared to litigate if necessary.
How this case turns out will affect how elections are run for years. If states prevail—as three federal courts have indicated they should—states will keep control over their own elections. If the federal government prevails, a profound shift in control over election systems and sensitive personal details will have occurred.
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