By Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration has been working for nearly a year on an effort to weed out noncitizens from voter rolls using a faulty data system while keeping those plans hidden from courts and Democratic election officials, internal Justice Department communications obtained by CNN show.
The White House was kept in the loop on the Justice Department’s progress, as it struggled to get cooperation from states in its sprawling requests for unredacted voter registration information, ultimately bringing lawsuits against 31 election chiefs. Only last month did the DOJ’s top voting lawyer acknowledge in the litigation that the department wanted to run the data through a citizenship verification system operated by the Department of Homeland Security.
Internal emails cited in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by a voter advocacy group challenging President Donald Trump’s sprawling voter data-collection and review project shed new light on the effort.
In one November 2025 email, Eric Neff, the current leader of the DOJ voting section, advised that the department keep some election officials in the dark about what the administration was intending to do with unredacted state voter rolls, which contain private information about Americans.
“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, discussing a letter from Democratic state officials that asked administration about plans to upload the data to DHS’ “unproven and potentially insecure citizenship-check system.”
In court filings and in formal correspondence with states about the data demands, the department had provided only vague explanations that it was assessing states’ compliance with two federal laws concerning voter registration.
Neff, in the November email exchange, referenced those laws and said that “none of them require 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,” he said.
Noncitizen voting is very rare and is prohibited in federal elections. But Trump is fixated on the idea, claiming without evidence that even the 2016 election that he won had been tainted by the millions of illegal ballots
State can already voluntarily use the program — known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement or (SAVE) — to review their voter lists, but those reviews have shown it can produce false positives that wrongly identify eligible voters as noncitizens.
Election officials of both parties have told CNN they’re worried the administration will use the audits to pressure states to conduct flawed purges that disenfranchise Americans, and that a state’s refusal to go along with those removals will be used as a pretext to cast doubt about November’s elections.
The Constitution tasks the states with the job of running elections, giving Congress some room to regulate voting, but assigning no unilateral authority on voting rules to the executive branch.
Trump nonetheless has said he wants to “nationalize” elections. His administration’s plans to do its own review for ineligible voters on state rolls — especially when coupled with