17 Former DOJ Attorneys Slam Wisconsin Voter Data Grab

Vote here sign. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Former federal voting rights attorneys — 17 in all — are taking the U.S. Department of Justice to task for its voter fraud “fishing expedition,” which has led the federal government to sue the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC).

The DOJ is seeking access to the complete voter rolls of every state in the country, including Wisconsin, trying to find evidence of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections, a claim President Donald Trump and his allies have long made without supporting evidence.

In private communications to states and public statements, DOJ officials have shown they intend to involve the federal government in purging state voter rolls. The Constitution and federal law explicitly leave the responsibility for running elections and maintaining voter rolls to states. A sitting federal judge recently characterized the DOJ’s campaign as an action that chips away at democracy and “imperils all Americans.”

Where states have refused the DOJ’s unprecedented data request, the federal government has sued. In December, WEC refused to turn over complete voter lists and told the DOJ that state law would prevent it from doing so. The DOJ has taken the matter to federal court, and organizations like the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans and Forward Latino and their heavy-weight election lawyers have joined the lawsuit on the side of WEC.

The 17 former DOJ attorneys are following suit. On Tuesday they filed a brief as a friend of the court, asking U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson to dismiss the case because federal law does not authorize “such a sweeping information request on such flimsy grounds.”

To gain access to state voter lists, the DOJ is using federal election laws enacted during the civil rights era and first used to investigate racial discrimination in voter registrations in the Jim Crow South — specifically, Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. “But DOJ has provided no basis for thinking that Wisconsin might be violating [federal law] in a manner that would justify its request for the State’s full, unredacted voter rolls,” the attorneys wrote.

The suit against the WEC was filed by Brittany Bennett, a trial attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and a former Republican lawyer in previous election challenge cases. In 2024, Bennett filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Georgia Republican Party arguing the state’s voting machines weren’t secure in the run-up to the presidential election.

The department claims it is seeking the voter information to confirm Wisconsin is complying with federal voter law. But the former DOJ attorneys say this reasoning is a “stalking horse” for the true mission: “to conduct its own list maintenance to discover whether noncitizens or undocumented immigrants are registered to vote.”

Federal law puts states in charge of voter list maintenance, which is a continuous and ongoing process. In confidential memorandums sent out to states like Wisconsin, the DOJ has asked state officials to agree to remove any voter registrations flagged by the federal government.

The DOJ seeks a “snapshot” of the state’s voter roll and likely plans to share the information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “discover what DOJ thinks are undocumented immigrants who are unlawfully voting,” according to the former DOJ attorneys.

Milwaukee County-based Forward Latino has  expressed concern in earlier legal filings that the federal government could use state voter datasets as a pretext for disenfranchising Latino voters and identifying citizens for denaturalization. The group has also pointed out that data included in the DOJ’s request may be incomplete or contradictory. For example, driver’s license registrations, which the DOJ seeks, are not automatically updated after someone attains citizenship.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, heading up the Civil Rights Division, has said, “You’re gonna see hundreds of thousands of people in some states being removed from the voter rolls, correctly.”

The former DOJ attorneys point out that a number of states have already run voter lists through a federal system called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE). The system was created to verify citizenship and immigration status when people apply for benefits or licenses. When applied to voter rolls, it has incorrectly identified citizens as noncitizen voters. SAVE has “never been perfect” and sometimes produces results based on “incomplete or outdated information,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The DOJ has the authority under federal law to investigate potentially unlawful voter registrations, the former DOJ attorneys said. But that investigation would not require sweeping access to state voter rolls, or involving the federal government in voter roll maintenance.  Such an investigation would be handled by the Criminal Division, and would only need access to publicly available voter data to start.

“But what DOJ cannot do is what it tries to do here: misuse the records provisions of the Civil Rights Act and [Help America Vote Act] to conduct fishing expeditions for highly sensitive personal information from every voter in a State while offering a pretextual investigative purpose.”

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