Senators Call On Attorney General To Investigate Federal Voter Investigations
WASHINGTON D.C. (KEYT) – Following a whistleblower's disclosure about the Trump Administration's potentially illegal actions to obtain private voter information earlier this month, California's Senators have called for the state's Attorney General to investigate the alleged violations of state law.
"Considering California's strong protections surrounding the use of voter registration information
and PII [personally identifiable information], we believe this Disclosure merits a review by your office to determine what actions are necessary and appropriate to protect California voters," detailed Senators Padilla and Schiff in a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. "Especially as agency leaders dismissed concerns raised by the Whistleblower and other officers about the legality of this conduct, instructing them to move forward with the searches anyway, we want to ensure that you have all available information necessary to investigate these allegations".
On Sep. 8 of this year, an anonymous federal whistleblower alleged to legislators that employees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were directed by officers with the agency's Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to use people's personal information to search state voter-registration systems shared Senator Padilla's Office earlier this month.
Each investigation may have violated state privacy laws and the whistleblower shared that officers were told to mask their identities as federal employees and pretend to be voters on state election agency websites detailed the California Senators.
Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states that decisions regarding, "the times, places, and manner of holding Elections" are delegated to Congress and managed by each state.
The Section does not mention any executive branch position, office, department or agency.
Federal law does require states to maintain accurate voter rolls, but does not authorize the Department of Homeland Security nor Citizenship and Immigration Services to participate in that maintenance.
According to the letter issued earlier this month, the whistleblower noted the following actions that could violate state and federal laws:
- USCIS directed officers to misrepresent themselves on state voter sites in order to access voter's private information. States like California require the use of personally identifiable information to access voter data and the Commonwealth of Virginia requires users of its voter records website to attest under penalty of law that the record is their own and the voter authorized such access
- Employees were directed to create federal law enforcement records against individuals, including naturalized citizens, regardless of their right to vote
- Training materials admit that naturalized U.S. citizens are in the data being sent for further investigation even if internal records appear inaccurate or unreliable and targets of the initiative have no knowledge of the allegations nor an opportunity to correct data records
- Officers were told in August of 2026 to stop and work on the new initiative after completing a single one-hour-and-forty-five minute training video and tasked with completing quotas to review at least 40 people per day as well as that the full review was expected to be completed by September 12 of this year
"The Trump Administration appears to be undertaking this rushed effort to find – or manufacture
– evidence for its baseless election conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud ahead of the
2026 midterm elections," claimed the Senators in their letter to Attorney General Bonta. "Of particular interest to Californians are the claims that USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] personnel were directed to misrepresent themselves on California's voter registration site to access voter data. California's voter registration website is clearly intended for the use of voters themselves, and requires the use of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) to access this voter data, including driver's license number and/or partial Social Security Number. As outlined in the USCIS training materials provided by this whistleblower, USCIS officers were directed to enter this information, obtained from other DHS [Department of Homeland Security] data, in order to access the voter data on California's voter website."
The California Registrar of Voters provides details to voters about their registration status on the "My Voter Status" website.
"To find your record, you will need to enter some personal information," explains the website which cautions users to, "Close your browser when you are done to protect your personal information."
California Election Code § 18109 states that it is a misdemeanor offense to knowingly misuse voter registration information or acquire voter's private information without complying with the state's election laws.
The recently disclosed initiative appears to be another attempt to federalize elections by the Trump Administration despite multiple previous attempts being blocked by federal courts.
On July 10, 2025, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division demanded that California Secretary of State Shirley Weber turn over an electronic, unredacted copy of the state's voter registration list within 14 days citing the need to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
"[T]he Attorney General is uniquely charged by Congress with the enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which were designed by Congress to ensure that states have proper and effective voter registration and voter list maintenance programs," argued the Justice Department in a press release about the nationwide lawsuits seeking voter information. "The Attorney General also has the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) at her disposal to demand the production, inspection, and analysis of the statewide voter registration lists."
On Aug. 8, 2025, Secretary of State Weber made California's voter registration list available for inspection at her office in Sacramento with some private information, including driver's license numbers and social security numbers, redacted citing the need to comply with state and federal privacy laws.
Instead of reviewing the provided voter information, on Sep. 25, 2025, the Department of Justice sued the state of California for access to unredacted statewide voter information.
California was not alone in complying with state and federal voter privacy laws.
The Department of Justice sent formal requests to over 40 states for copies of their respective voter lists and multiple states including Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Pennsylvania were sued by the federal government to force them to turn over their voter lists last year.
Later the same month, over a quarter of the U.S. Senate signed a letter demanding an end to the Department of Justice's nationwide pursuit of private voter information.
In January of this year, a federal judge dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit seeking access to Californian's private voter information calling the attempt, "unprecedented and illegal".
"[T]he right to vote was won through generations of sacrifices from marginalized communities the American political system devalued, but who were determined to make the promise of democracy real," explained Judge Carter in his January dismissal. "The pieces of legislation at issue in this litigation were not passed as an unrestricted means for the Executive to collect highly sensitive information about the American people. It is not for the Executive, or even this Court to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans. That power belongs solely to Congress."
Regardless of those legal setbacks, President Trump issued Executive Order 14399 in March of this year which attempted to assert executive branch authority over voter information nationwide by citing the same voting rights legislation the Department of Justice had failed to prove provided such authority in multiple federal courtrooms.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a permanent injunction for key parts of Executive Order 14399 from taking effect months later explaining, "[I]t is hereby ORDERED and DECLARED that Sections 2 and 3 of the EO [Executive Order 14399] are legally void as they are ultra vires and unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers, and that Section 5 of the EO is merely precatory".
While the Trump Administration battled the legality of its actions in federal court, the U.S. Postal Service proposed and then began implementing changes to how ballots are processed through the mail and even publicly declaring that citizens of non-compliant states would no longer be able to submit their ballot through the mail.
During testimony in June, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the U.S. Postal Service would refuse to deliver ballots to states that did not comply with the proposed rule which the federal agency argued was in compliance with Executive Order 14399.
Instead of complying with the June ruling by Judge Talwani, the Trump Administration appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled in August that the U.S. Postal Service could continue to implement the sweeping changes, but notably did not rule on the legality of the policy.
Later the same month, a coalition of Attorneys General filed a new lawsuit challenging the rule change and, once again, a federal judge found the changes were unlawful and enjoined their implementation.
On Sep. 13, 2026, another federal judge halted the U.S. Postal Services attempts to fundamentally alter voting nationwide.
"As the Government concedes, the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule," explained U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Carl Nichols in the order. "Plaintiffs have demonstrated that, absent an injunction, there is an increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections. The public has a strong interest in ensuring that doesn't happen."
The U.S. Supreme Court was once again called upon to clarify the law and upheld the lower court's decisions blocking the implementation of the Postal Service changes before November's elections.
"After losing in the district and appellate courts, the Trump Administration has now lost at the U.S. Supreme Court. Today's decision is a victory for our democracy and a powerful affirmation of the rule of law," shared California Attorney General Rob Bonta after the Supreme Court's ruling on mail-based voting rule changes attempted by the U.S. Postal Service this year. "The stakes in this litigation could not have been higher. Voting is the fundamental right from which all other rights flow, and all 50 states allow ballots to be cast by mail in some form. In California and several other states, mail voting is the primary way elections are conducted. Had this rule been allowed to take effect, the consequences would have been catastrophic."
While those various attempts have been repeatedly struck down in federal courts, according to this month's whistleblower, the Trump Administration was actively circumventing federal and state laws protecting voter information under the guise of federal law enforcement.
"Disclosure reveals that FDNS [Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate] officers were provided with thousands of Californians' information to investigate whether they were 'unlawful voters'. The ultimate source of the data used for this target list is unknown, but the training materials state '[t]his public voter file for California was passed to us by [DHS].'," detailed Senators Padilla and Schiff's letter to Attorney General Bonta. "[T]he U.S. Department of Justice has been unsuccessful in its attempt to compel California to provide its voter information to the Trump Administration, raising serious questions about what this data is, how DHS obtained it, and whether they complied with the law in collecting and using this data."
While the legality of those actions alleged by this month's whistleblower is now subject to review by the Attorney General's Office, the quality of the investigation was also called into question.
"The Disclosure further claims that agency leadership knew that this data was unreliable, yet FDNS officers were directed to create federal law enforcement records (known as 'TECS' records) against individuals, many of whom are U.S. citizens," noted the Senator's letter to Attorney General Bonta. "In fact, '[o]fficers are specifically told to rely on the data DHS provided for California and use the voter registration dates and voting dates provided in that data to indicate that the subject may be an unlawful voter and create a TECS record.' According to the Disclosure, 'a significant number of TECS records, potentially thousands or tens of thousands, will be created against California residents based on data that an officer may have good reason to believe is unreliable or inaccurate without corroboration.' This is especially concerning since the agency's own training materials admit that there are 'a lot of U.S. citizens' in the data."
Once again, California Election Code § 18109 states that it is illegal to misuse voter registration information or acquire voter's private information without complying with the state's election laws.
Using unlawfully obtained private voter information to abuse the My Voter Status website would be a violation of state law and subject to fines for each infraction.
When the whistleblower's allegations were first reported, Senators Padilla and Schumer gave the Department of Homeland Security a deadline of Sep. 21, 2026 to fully respond to the allegations.
"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," concluded Judge Carter in January's dismissal of the Department of Justice's demands for legally protected voter data of Californians. "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. 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."
