Background: Voters cast their ballots during the primary election in Windsor, Conn., Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Rusty Jones, File). Inset: President Donald Trump reacts as a reporter asks a question in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Aug. 31, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
As citizens wait to see whether the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will be able to take charge of mail-in voting from the states, a new lawsuit has been filed to keep the Trump administration from forcing states to abide by its own “voter lists” so that it can “seize control over elections.”
The 41-page complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) challenges a section of an executive order from President Donald Trump that it says has not yet been addressed by a court ruling. The organization is not just concerned about the privacy implications of the federal government seizing citizens’ personal information such as Social Security numbers (SSNs), but also about the apparent harm to citizens’ voting rights.
“Defendants’ actions imperil millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” the lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court of Maryland states. “Defendants are creating the State Citizenship Lists by repurposing data the government admits is unreliable, outdated, and incomplete,” it adds, alleging that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its secretary, Markwayne Mullin, are “aggressively pushing state election officials to use this admittedly unreliable data to purge their voter rolls of purported non-citizens—under threat of ‘fines,’ ‘penalties,’ and even ‘prison time.'”
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In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” whereby, among other things, he told DHS to “compare voter records with ‘Federal immigration databases.'” To comply with the instruction, DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) “haphazardly made major changes” to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, the complaint says.
The federal agencies then “pushed states to bulk upload their entire statewide voter lists” into the modified system despite “widespread” mistakes already documented. A judge ultimately vacated the modifications, but by then, Trump had apparently already come up with a new plan.
In March of this year, Trump signed another executive order taking aim at elections, with this one titled, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”
This order, in addition to seeking to have USPS control states’ mail-in voting processes, contained a section seemingly with even larger ramifications.
Part of the order commands federal agencies to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be” citizens age 18 or older at the time of an upcoming federal election. The list of “eligible” voters must be created and shared “no fewer than 60 days” before each federal election, and the complaint says DHS has promised to do so by Friday through a new online “portal.”
The privacy organization says DHS, SSA, and the State Department have been “scrambling to implement this directive” before the November election. It suggests that not only is the federal government’s process hurried, but “flagrantly unlawful.”
“No statute authorizes Defendants to share and centralize vast volumes of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies to create and disclose the ‘State Citizenship Lists,'” the complaint states. “And in doing so, Defendants are running roughshod over critical safeguards of the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’), and the constitutional separation of powers.”
To put it simply, the lawsuit alleges the Trump administration has no authority to do as it wishes here. In fact, the first lines of the complaint make EPIC’s point clear.
Multiple statutes restrict federal agencies from sharing and disseminating Americans’ sensitive personal information. And the Constitution gives states—not the Executive Branch—authority over determining voter eligibility and federal election procedures. Yet, in its attempt to seize control over elections, the Trump Administration has brushed aside these laws and constitutional limits by ordering the mass centralization and sharing of Americans’ data for ultimate use in determining voter eligibility
The “list-making scheme” is not a distant vision but “well underway,” according to the lawsuit, which provided a link to a DHS website announcing the “State Citizenship Lists Portal” is “Coming Soon.”
EPIC says the “intrusion” upon its members’ “sensitive personal information” is particularly “alarming and offensive” because “they were given no advance notice or opportunity to comment” on the “novel misuse of their personal information before it began, as the law requires, and because there is no way to opt out.”
“This intrusion is causing EPIC members to fear the consequences of providing information to their government and accessing public services in the future, has diminished EPIC members’ trust in government, and is frustrating EPIC members’ reasonable expectation of going about their private lives without the unconsented collection and disclosure of their personal data by the federal government,” the lawsuit adds. “In addition to these privacy-related harms, EPIC members who are registered to vote in states that access the State Citizenship Lists are also at grave risk of suffering harms to their voting rights and right to participate in the political process as a result of Defendants’ actions.”
The organization seeks, among other things, a court order declaring that the decision to create and disclose the voter lists is “unlawful” and “unconstitutional,” as well as the deletion of any such lists and information extracted from them.
The post Trump admin unlawfully creating ‘voter lists’ with citizens’ personal information and directing states as to who can and can’t vote, complaint says first appeared on Law & Crime.
