Trump’s Justice Dept. asked Pennsylvania to turn over its voter-registration list

The Department of Justice has asked Pennsylvania to turn over its entire, unredacted, voter-registration list as part of the Trump administration’s nationwide campaign to demand election records from the states.

In a letter Monday, the agency asked Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt to turn over all voter-registration data from the November 2022 election through last year’s presidential election.

Additionally, the letter asked Schmidt to identify any registered voters who had been removed from the state’s rolls for lack of citizenship, incompetency, or a felony conviction.

The letter, which The Inquirer obtained Thursday, follows similar requests to at least 15 other states for voter-roll information, according to the Associated Press.

The Department of Justice has sent dozens of letters to state election officials, including in Pennsylvania, seeking voter rolls; requesting information about election processes; and asking state officials to develop information-sharing relationships.

In a Friday statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the DOJ had a “statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws,” but she did not indicate any specific issue being investigated in Pennsylvania.

“Ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration,” Dhillon said.

A Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson said the state has not yet responded and declined to comment further.

The Justice Department probe into election information comes as President Donald Trump continues to make false claims of fraud in the 2020 election and has sought to influence the outcome of the 2026 midterms, strongly seeking redistricting in red states like Texas.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the actions of the federal government appeared designed to sow doubt in election security ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“This is the first time we’ve ever seen the federal government weaponized to amplify false claims of voter fraud,” he said.

The letters seeking information on voter rolls, he said, often misrepresented or exhibited misunderstanding about federal election data and the role of the federal government in voter-roll maintenance. The federal government, he said, has no such role and cannot legally request the data from the states.

Earlier this summer Pennsylvania received and responded to a DOJ letter that contained a series of questions about the commonwealth’s voter-registration procedures. And last month the DOJ sent another letter asking for a meeting with Schmidt to discuss information sharing.

The request for the state’s full, unredacted, voter-registration list represents an escalation in the federal inquiry as the list contains personal identifying information for the commonwealth’s more than 8 million registered voters.

Thus far, the Associated Press reports, no state has fully complied with the agency’s requests. Some have sent redacted versions of the list to the agency. Others, including Maine and Minnesota, have refused to comply in any way, arguing that the administration’s request violates state and federal law.

Vic Walczak, legal director at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said he hopes the commonwealth follows other states’ examples. The ACLU has sued to keep the Department of State from turning voter rolls over to a legislative committee, and he said they would do the same to prevent the records from going to the federal government.

“Our view of the law is that Pennsylvania voters have a significant privacy interest in the nonpublic information contained in those voter rolls and that Pennsylvania cannot give that over without giving notice to voters and giving them the opportunity to contest that,” he said.

The agency asked Pennsylvania to provide all the requested information within 14 days.

The DOJ request sparked outrage and alarm among voting-rights advocates, who also noted that the commonwealth’s elections are secure.

“Without knowing what the intention is behind this request, it appears to contribute to a narrative that increases distrust in our elections — one that there has been no credible evidence to support,“ Genevieve Green, a spokesperson for the Philly-based civic engagement group the Committee of Seventy, said in a statement.

Others worried that the administration was setting a dangerous precedent that placed democratic norms and institutions at risk.

“When federal agencies are deployed to question well-functioning election systems without clear justification, it follows a concerning pattern we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes worldwide,” Neil Makhija, a Democrat who chairs the Montgomery County Election Board, said in a text.

It’s unclear how the Trump administration intends to use the data it requested, which worried State Rep. Tim Brennan, a Democrat who has practiced election law and represents a district in Bucks County that includes Doylestown and New Hope.

“I’ve seen too many efforts by President Trump and candidate Trump to undermine people’s trust in the process, while seemingly only wanting people to trust him,” Brennan said.

Staff writer Evgenia Anastasakos contributed to this article.