A US Border Patrol agent pulls the pin of a crowd control grenade before throwing it at assembled press and protesters outside a Minneapolis hotel where a demonstration was staged in the wake of the killing of a second local resident by US Border Patrol this month.Tom Hudson/ZUMA
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On Saturday, the same day that a federal immigration officer killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a pointed letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stating that if he wanted to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” he should comply with some “common sense solutions.”
Those “solutions,” according to Bondi, included Minnesota providing the Department of Justice with access to the state’s complete, unredacted voter roll, which includes sensitive personal information like voters’ Social Security numbers, drivers license data, and party affiliations. Bondi claimed that the DOJ needed the state’s full voter roll in order to “confirm Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”
But state election officials and election security experts say Bondi’s letter is an outrageous attempt by the Trump administration to coerce Minnesota into providing confidential voter data that could be weaponized by the president and his allies to amplify false claims of voter fraud, wrongly remove eligible voters from the rolls, and challenge election outcomes.
“That is simply a disgusting attempt to take attention away from Alex Pretti’s death,” said Joanna Lydgate, president of the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “It’s also a shakedown. They’re trying now to use the power of the federal government to scare Minnesota officials into handing over voter rolls and backing down on their protective policies. Trump wants that state voter data so that he has the ability to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections.”
Months before federal immigration agents killed Pretti and Renée Good in broad daylight, the DOJ had already requested complete voter rolls from 44 states and Washington, DC, including Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Only eleven red states have complied with the request, with most others citing federal and state privacy laws that preclude officials from sharing voters’ personal information, not to mention the fact that states are in charge of running their own elections under the Constitution. The DOJ has since sued 24 states and counting, including Minnesota, which ranks highest in the country for state voter turnout and is often lauded as a model for having robust election security protocols.
“It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
As Mother Jones reported in December, these requests and lawsuits are part of a decades-long history of right-wing activists seeking private voter data to advance the unproven narrative that there is rampant non-citizen voter fraud proliferating across the US. That the DOJ is now using its considerable resources to promote the same repeatedly debunked theory represents a major escalation of these tactics.
As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows—who has also been sued by the DOJ for voter roll data—told us: “The Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.”
Bondi’s letter raises the stakes of the DOJ’s demands for state voter roll data even further, according to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, by suggesting that ICE will only leave Minneapolis if the state capitulates to the administration’s demands. “It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security,” he said in a statement on Sunday.
The administration appears to want the voter data in order to construct an unprecedented national database of all registered voters, which it would share with the Department of Homeland Security. Such a database could be a prime target for hackers and could be easily weaponized to spread false claims of illegal voting, which could then be used to remove eligible voters from the rolls and challenge election outcomes.
The Justice Department recently admitted that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team at the Social Security Administration may have handed over Americans personal information to an advocacy group working to “overturn election results in certain states,” and suggested they be prosecuted.
Three courts have recently ruled against the administration’s demand for such voter data. The first came in California, with U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruling that the state did not need to hand over its voter list to the DOJ.
“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data,” Carter wrote. “This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation. The centralization of this information by the federal government would have 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. This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.”
A judge in Oregon indicated from the bench that he would rule against the administration while a third judge in Georgia dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit against the state, indicating it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.
Weighing a federal lawsuit examining whether the Trump Administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” can continue in Minnesota, a federal judge also expressed outrage at the administration’s new demand for state voter data, asking the DOJ in court, “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?”
Bondi’s recent letter to Walz suggests that, after repeatedly losing in court, the administration is now using more aggressive methods, including exploiting a horrific tragedy, to get what it wants.
“The administration has really shown its hand,” Lydgate says. “They’re using these violent ICE operations as a weapon to try to get states to change immigration policies, voter data, and to shrink their power. And the states are standing up, and they’re pushing back.”
