The Trump administration’s legal pursuit to acquire sensitive voter registration data in Illinois and numerous other states is part of a wider campaign to cleanse state voter rolls of alleged noncitizens, as revealed by recent federal court documents filed in Springfield.
ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch
These documents, submitted on April 30 by lawyers for the Illinois AFL-CIO and other intervening groups, aim to block the Department of Justice from accessing this information. They argue the DOJ’s stated reason—to ensure Illinois complies with voter list maintenance—is merely a pretext, and are calling for the case against the state to be dismissed.
Read the filing
In March, several former DOJ attorneys from the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section submitted an amicus brief, contending that the agency lacks the legal authority to request this data for its own list maintenance or to identify noncitizens.
The newly filed documents on Thursday include internal emails from the DOJ, which the attorneys claim were obtained through a public records request lawsuit.
One notable email, dated June 16, 2025, from Michael Gates, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, was sent to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who supervises the division. In it, Gates mentions the division’s efforts to access the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.
“This will be helpful to us because it will allow us to compare this SAVE database against states’ voter rolls, which we will get directly from states under the (National Voter Registration Act),” Gates wrote.
The next month, on July 28, DOJ sent its first letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections seeking access to Illinois’ complete, unredacted statewide voter registration list, indicating that it was part of DOJ’s efforts to enforce voter list maintenance provisions of NVRA. The letter was signed by Gates. It also bore the name of Maureen Riordan, acting chief of the Voting Section within the Civil Rights Division.
Gates has since left the Justice Department. He is currently a Republican candidate for California attorney general in that state’s upcoming June 2 primary.
SAVE database
The SAVE database was originally set up to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for public benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Some states also use it to verify people’s eligibility to vote.
But the program has also been the target of criticism because of its tendency to misidentify people as noncitizens due to its use of incomplete or inaccurate data.
On April 21, the watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit against DOJ in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleging the agency wants to use state voter registration lists and the SAVE database to conduct what they call “a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus that endangers millions of Americans’ fundamental voting and privacy rights.”
A second document filed last week in the Illinois case is a Nov. 18, 2025, email from the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, Eric Neff, that appears to suggest how the agency should conceal its intentions when asked why it is seeking states’ voter registration databases.
“I believe our reply should always be: ‘We will use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law’ and say nothing more,” Neff wrote to fellow DOJ lawyers Jesus Osete and Matt Zandi. He also said of the Help America Vote Act, the Civil Rights Act and NVRA, “none of them require (us) to give the states information about what we are going to do with the data. No judge will have authority to limit us beyond a promise of Federal law compliance.”
Illinois lawsuit
Illinois has refused to hand over an unredacted voter registration list. Instead, it has provided DOJ with electronic copies of partially redacted files that do not include sensitive information such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers.
In December, DOJ filed suit in the Central District of Illinois seeking access to the unredacted files. It also filed similar suits in 29 other states and Washington, D.C.
The Illinois AFL-CIO, Common Cause several and other groups have intervened as codefendants in the case.
Attorneys for the state and the intervening parties have filed motions to dismiss the DOJ lawsuit. Judge Colleen Lawless has not yet ruled on the motion. Similar suits have already been dismissed in six other states. No court has yet ruled in favor of DOJ’s request for access to the unredacted voter files.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
