Over the weekend, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota an extortion letter. In it, she demanded that he “must restore rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.”
Never mind who created and continues to sow that chaos.
Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over its records on SNAP and Medicaid, that it abandon its sanctuary city policies, and (here’s the kicker) provide the DOJ access to the state’s voter rolls. Failure to comply, she implied, would mean the “chaos” would continue.
That last request for voter data caused immediate and widespread alarm among democracy activists and voting rights lawyers. As Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias ▶explained, with such data the Trump regime could cause real mayhem in the midterm elections, undermine confidence in the results and even use it to stay in power.
But how would possession of the data permit that? We don’t have to look very far back to see how.
Before we get to that, let’s unpack the DOJ’s extortion letter and survey the immediate reaction to it. Then we’ll review what voter data really is and why it’s so valuable. And that will help demonstrate why this latest attempted data grab by the Justice Department is so dangerous.
The Bondi letter begins with a highly partisan and distorted justification for the federal surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It lays the blame for the violence and unrest on local leaders rather than the federal government**, **which deliberately escalated the situation in the first place.
But rhetoric aside, the part that drew the most attention was her demand that Walz
“allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”
Bondi claimed, “Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.”
This is Orwellian and, of course, not the actual intended goal. Indeed, the demand for state voter rolls is so disconnected from the question of ICE in Minneapolis that it raised immediate concerns about the real purpose behind the regime’s brutality.
The explosive implications of Bondi’s letter have already ricocheted across the country. In Minnesota, where the state has filed a case to halt the ICE surge, an attorney representing the state, Lindsey Middlecamp, described the request as a “ransom note” that amounted to unconstitutional coercion.
“It’s a shakedown letter,” further argued Brian Scott Carter of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. “That’s what you expect from someone who is extorting you.”
Adrian Fontes, the top election official for Arizona, agreed. In a video posted online, he labeled Bondi’s demands“disturbing” and said that the department was “basically trying to blackmail” Minnesota. Arizona is currently defending a lawsuit brought by the DOJ to gain access to its voter data.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, who on Monday heard arguments on whether to temporarily halt the federal operation in that state, pressed U.S. government lawyers on Bondi’s demands in the letter. “Is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcing immigration law?” she asked.
In Oregon, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, who is presiding over a case brought by the DOJ to compel Oregon to turn over its voter data, ordered the parties to supplement their arguments by videoconference in light of the Bondi letter. On Monday, Judge Kasubhai dismissed the case. (The parties agreed the Bondi letter had no bearing on the issues at this time.)
As the New York Times noted in characteristically understated fashion, Bondi’s demand for voter data “seemed to have little to do with immigration or the state’s fraud scandal, the stated reasons for the federal government’s presence in Minnesota.”
So why exactly does the government want these files so badly that the Justice Department is willing to tie them directly to the question of ICE enforcement and the surge of agents?
These are no ordinary files, and this is no ordinary data. Many incorrectly assume that they comprise only voters’ names and addresses. But as the Times notes,
[T]he complete, unredacted voter file includes personal identifying information, like driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. This list is kept private and is maintained by top election officials in each state.
Traditionally, no one can obtain it through public records requests — not even the Justice Department.
In other words, this is the kind of data hackers would love to get their hands on to impersonate people and perpetuate fraud. And that gives us a clue as to what the Justice Department is up to.
In my piece last week discussing how the Trump regime is trying to screw with the midterm elections, I noted that the DOJ has been trying for a year to get its hands on this voter data. It issued official demands to 43 states to turn over unredacted voter files, including versions containing sensitive personal information and identifiers such as the last four digits of Social Security numbers, party affiliation and voters’ dates of birth.
Eight states (all red ones) turned over that information, but dozens of others, including Minnesota, refused.
The DOJ claims this voter information is necessary to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. But as I noted earlier, those laws already require states to conduct voter list maintenance. And a snapshot conducted today of those rolls, as the DOJ has demanded, wouldn’t even provide sufficient information to evaluate a state’s list maintenance programs.
The DOJ is likely really after something far more nefarious. For an explanation of that, we turn to Marc Elias of Democracy Docket.
Elias notes first that the voter data requests by DOJ, and the barrage of litigation that ensued, are unprecedented. No other administration has ever sought this information from the states. That’s important to keep in mind because our elections have been functioning just fine when run, as intended, by the states. Interference like this from the federal government has never happened before.
States collect this data on voters in order to properly run their elections, to keep their voter databases current even when voters move or pass away, and generally to prevent and deter fraud. In the right hands, this data is very useful and does a lot of good. But in the wrong hands, it can be weaponized.
We already saw that weaponization in action when right-wing vigilante groups attempted to challenge statewide election results in Georgia in 2021, when both Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock prevailed for the Democrats. Private right-wing groups sought, through the use of publicly available voter data, to purge huge numbers of voters from the rolls by lodging private challenges authorized by state law. Elias’s firm fought these challenges and beat them back, but he saw firsthand the danger they posed and began to sound the alarm.
After all, any effort to register voters, to turn out voters, to suppress voters, or to challenge voters, to disenfranchise voters or to challenge election results begins with the state voter data files. They are what Elias calls the “building blocks” of our entire voting system. Those files will tell whoever is in possession of them some very important information: who voted, what party they belong to, what race they are, what gender they are, how old they are, where they live, and who the strongest base supporters are based on voting history.
Voter challenges
Right-wing organizations have mounted hundreds of thousands of voter challenges using publicly available voter data. Election officials and judges have been highly skeptical about such challenges in the past, recognizing them as voter-suppression efforts.
But it’s entirely different if it’s the Department of Justice that has come into court, armed with spreadsheets and making what appear to be specific claims against specific voters. Courts are likely to take such claims far more seriously because they are backed by actual “data”—even if that data is out of date, lacks a secure chain-of-custody, or has been manipulated in some way. (If you think this regime is above manipulating data, you haven’t been paying attention.) Remember also that Trump is not above directly threatening local election officials with criminal charges unless they act the way he wants. That could include coercing officials to purge millions from the voter rolls.
New laws and Executive Orders
The White House has already issued a barrage of executive orders on voting that are being challenged in court. And red state legislatures, such as in Texas, have already used voter data to squeeze out more red districts through unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering. Elias warns that the regime and its enablers, armed with unredacted voter data from the states, could target entire groups of voters through specific legislation and executive orders designed to suppress or disenfranchise them entirely.
This danger isn’t theoretical. As early as 2013, the GOP passed voter suppression laws in states like North Carolina using targeting data. A federal court found, in striking the vote suppression law down as unconstitutional, that the state had targeted African American voters with “almost surgical precision.” At the time, this was a victory for voting rights. But we should have little confidence that the current extremist majority on the Supreme Court would reach such a conclusion today.
Use in litigation. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republican lawyers were laughed out of court and lost over 60 cases, winning just one. They usually failed out of the gate for one clear reason: They made unsubstantiated claims publicly but could not support those claims in court. There was simply no data behind them.
Today, it would not be Trump’s bumbling campaign lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell arguing the cases. Rather, it would be U.S. attorneys armed with data and spreadsheets claiming to have uncovered “fraud” and “irregularities” in the election. That patina of authority could be enough to keep cases from being tossed outright, buying critical time as deadlines to certify close in. And that could cause a cascade effect.
Election certification
GOP leaders at the national level, such as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), could leverage false claims by the DOJ to call into question the validity of key elections and seek to delay the seating of Democrats who prevailed in their states. Meanwhile, election deniers at the state and local level could claim “fraud” while arming themselves with statements by the DOJ that there were fake voters on the rolls, even if that data is wrong or manipulated.
If this seems speculative, recall that this was the actual game plan proposed in late 2020 by a rogue DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to send a letter from the Justice Department to the state of Georgia advising them to call the legislature back into session to nullify the results of the election.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine could go into overdrive to spread disinformation about election fraud, just as it did after the November 2020 election. But this time, they could point to “data” put out by a corrupt DOJ to avoid any liability for making false election fraud claims.
All this could lead to a breakdown of our electoral system that would mirror or even dwarf what we saw on January 6, 2021. Imagine the Democrats winning both the House and the Senate, but Trump and his cronies like Pam Bondi issuing a memo saying they had evidence, based on actual voter data files, that there was widespread fraud in the midterms and that the results cannot be certified. There are no Mike Pences or any lawyers with enough integrity high up in the DOJ to stop Trump this time, and there’s every indication that his allies in Congress and in the red states would bow to his wishes and go along with this false claim.
This could set up an explosive showdown that Trump would relish because of the potential for chaos or even violence, just as we saw on January 6th.
The good news, at least so far, is that courts are on to the Justice Department and are siding with states against the federal government, which has no say or role in the running of the midterms. The White House is plainly frustrated, so it’s issuing threats, just like we saw from Attorney General Bondi in her letter to Gov. Walz.
More conservative appellate courts and SCOTUS itself have yet to weigh in, however. And that could change the situation on the ground quickly.
The year 2026 is going to be about big election data and its abuses. We’ve already seen the GOP use such data and technology to create new gerrymanders that Republicans didn’t even believe were possible before. Next, we will see them try to use the same data, if they can get their hands on it, to attempt to disenfranchise voters, purge rolls, challenge ballots and overturn election results.
One way we can all fight back is to ensure, at the individual level, that our own voter data is up to date and complete. That will make it harder for the Justice Department to mount widespread voter challenges. We should not only double-check this for ourselves, we should spread the word so that each of our family members, friends and networks perform the same confirmation.
We also need to target and message GOP leaders who still believe in and defend our electoral system and get them on the record against what the Trump White House is up to. Pinning down these leaders in advance of the election, and getting them to admit that our elections are conducted in free and fair ways at the state level, will be important, especially if and when wild claims of fraud begin to issue from the White House and DOJ.
Lastly, we must turn out in November in such huge numbers that the regime’s claims of election fraud fall decidedly flat, so much so that the legacy media doesn’t even buy it. In advance of the election, there will be widespread polling. And on Election Day, there will be exit polling. If we are ahead by high single or even double digits going in and coming out of Election Day, it will be far harder for the White House to make the case that widespread fraud caused the GOP to lose the election. Independent voters in particular will need to be heard and counted.
In short, we are not powerless collectively to stop this. But we need to remain informed, take individual action and spread the word. Our very democracy is on the line, and we must all help hold it.
