For Geoff Foster, the Trump administration’s unusual demand for Minnesota’s unredacted voter rolls, laden with sensitive personal information, in exchange for federal agents leaving the state, has a familiar ring to it.
Which makes it no less disturbing.
Foster is the executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts. And the good government group has joined a federal court fight to block the U.S. Justice Department from accessing similar information in the Bay State.
“It’s about more than one state’s voter file,” Foster told MassLive. “It’s about whether the federal government can trample state law, seize our personal data and use it to take control of election administration from the states.”
The Trump administration made its initial ask for the Massachusetts voter data last July. It’s part of a broader effort to build what observers have described as a national voter database, on its own, bypassing the usual congressional authority needed to take such an action.
And when Secretary of State Bill Galvin, the state’s chief elections officer, refused last December, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston, asking a judge to force the state to cough up the information.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has faced sharp criticism for her headline-grabbing action in Minnesota, with Gov. Maura Healey, among others, rebuking her for a demand that they say has nothing to do with immigration enforcement.
“We’ve seen the attorney general, Pam Bondi, with whom I served, making outrageous, illegal, unlawful threats to state officials, essentially extortion, saying, produce your voter rolls in exchange for ICE leaving town,” Healey, a Democrat and a former two-term state attorney general, said Monday.
Since it returned to power in 2025, the Trump administration has asked nearly every state and Washington, D.C., to turn over their unredacted voter rolls. Some have cooperated outright, while others have asked for more information.
Right now, the Bay State is one of 24 states, joined by the District of Columbia, that’s duking it out in court with the Justice Department over access to their unredacted voter records, according to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Here’s a look at why the White House’s demand is so unusual and what’s at stake.
What are voter rolls?
Most states have a public version of their voter rolls that includes basic information such as a voter’s first and last name and address information, The New York Times reported.
It’s not unusual, for instance, for political campaigns to pay a fee to access this information to target voters as they work to build support for candidates and issues.
Unredacted voter files, such as those sought by the Justice Department, contain such sensitive information as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, which can be used for voter verification.
And usually, that information is off limits in public records requests — even to the U.S. Justice Department, which Bondi helms, the newspaper reported.
In court filings, the Justice Department has argued that it has “sweeping powers” to access the voter information that states are required to maintain under the law.
And if states refuse, the courts have a “limited, albeit vital, role” in helping the government gain access to those records, the government argued in its Massachusetts filing.
But legal experts say there’s no compelling reason for them to want that information, since the authority over elections is granted to states under the U.S. Constitution.
“For months, Trump’s DOJ has been aggressively trying to gain access to all the sensitive voter information in state voter rolls,” Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, wrote in a social media post. “States have shared redacted copies of their rolls, but most have refused to turn over the private stuff because they are required to protect voter privacy.”
“The federal government actually has no business collecting voter rolls from around the country (and) keeping those records,” Weiser continued in the lengthy thread on Bluesky. “In our system, it is the states who are responsible for maintaining (and) protecting voter rolls. And there are federal laws that limit what personal data the feds can keep and how.”
What’s happened before?
Since his emergence on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has regularly tried to leverage the courts for political advantage.
“A charitable assessment of the federal government’s involvement is that their heart is in the right place, and they don’t have the legal authority (to do it),” Stephen Richer, a Republican who was the elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, where he oversaw elections, told MassLive.
“A less charitable assessment would be to say they are seeking to interfere with the administration of elections,” Richer, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said.
Richer lost a primary challenge in 2024, after defending the integrity of local elections in the heavily Republican county.
Richer told MassLive he could not recall an instance where two agencies, in this case, the Justice Department and Homeland Security, had worked together to seek voter rolls.
“A lot of election officials are wondering what the federal government’s goal is in obtaining all the information,” he said. “The federal government doesn’t have a role” in election administration or voter registration.
Why does it matter?
First off, it’s not immediately clear why the Justice Department asked for Minnesota’s records.
But there is a likely through line: The fallout from the 2020 election and its implications for this fall’s midterm elections.
There’s been speculation that Bondi wants to share Minnesota’s voter information with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to try to ferret out noncitizens, according to published reports.
Here’s why that’s a big deal.
Trump has continued to cling to and advance the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, arguing in part that noncitizens voted that year.
“All analyses of state voter rolls have found a very small number of noncitizens who are registered and an even smaller number of noncitizens who have voted,” Richer said. He pointed to a recent analysis by Utah state officials showing that, of the state’s 2 million registered voters, two noncitizens had registered and one “who had potentially participated in a previous election.”
“Does it happen? Yes.” Richer said. “Is it material? No.”
With control of Congress on the line and impeachment likely to follow if Democrats regain control of one or both sides of Capitol Hill, the stakes are higher for elections that usually end badly for whoever’s in the White House.
“What they would say is that they’re policing voter fraud. But the states are already policing voter fraud,” Jeremy Paul, a constitutional law professor at Northeastern University Law School, told MassLive.
“Voter fraud really is a nonexistent problem,” Paul continued. “So what they’re really after is a way of getting information so they can try to purge people from the voter rolls and scare people out of voting.”
“The states are supposed to be in charge of voting, so this is a very simple issue. If Congress were to pass a statute that authorized voter rolls, then there would be some very hard issues. But right now, there is no statute. There’s just pure executive action,” he said.
What’s next?
An inspection of the federal court file for the Massachusetts case showed the usual volley of paperwork. Galvin, who declined a request for comment citing the litigation, has until Feb. 6 to file a response to the government’s initial complaint.
Meanwhile, court watchers and voting rights advocates are keeping an eye on the progress of the litigation, the rhetoric from Washington and what it means as the midterms close in.
Richer, the Arizona official, said the federal government already has been dealt some early legal defeats and expects that to continue.
“I think the federal government, especially the administration, has shown more enthusiasm for election administration than the law gives it permission for,” he said.
“In March 2025, the president issued an executive order that attempted to make broad changes to election administration. So far, every court has ruled against the president because it’s not a power of the executive,” Richer said.
Foster, who said he’s “confident the law is on our side,” is intent on making sure that “Massachusetts voters and our 29,000 members are represented as a party in this lawsuit. We are there with the specific goal to protect voters’ privacy and to protect the integrity of our election administration in Massachusetts.
“We’re very confident the court will decide in favor of voters,” he said.
