{"id":15593,"date":"2025-11-18T10:40:38","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T17:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/state-election-officials-including-colorado-ask-if-they-were-misled-by-trump-administration\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T19:34:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:34:28","slug":"state-election-officials-including-colorado-ask-if-they-were-misled-by-trump-administration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/state-election-officials-including-colorado-ask-if-they-were-misled-by-trump-administration\/","title":{"rendered":"State election officials, including Colorado, \u200b\u200bask if they were \u2018misled\u2019 by Trump administration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Voters
Voters cast in-person ballots Nov. 5 at the La Plata County Clerk and Recorder\u2019s Office in Bodo Industrial Park. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A group of Democratic secretaries of state in a letter to top Trump administration officials say they\u2019re concerned the administration misled them about how it would use voter data collected from their states.<\/p>\n

The letter, dated Tuesday, is addressed to Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, and Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Justice, overseen by Bondi, in recent months has demanded voter information from numerous states. The information would allow the DOJ to evaluate state compliance with federal voting laws, department officials had said.<\/p>\n

But federal officials later acknowledged that the DOJ shared voter roll information with Homeland Security to search it for noncitizens as a way to \u201cscrub aliens from voter rolls.\u201d<\/p>\n

The secretaries in their letter express \u201cimmense concern\u201d about how the information is being shared, and they \u201cseek clarity on whether DOJ and DHS actively misled election officials regarding the uses of voter data.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter is signed by Colorado\u2019s Jena Griswold as well as Adrian Fontes of Arizona, Shirley Weber of California, Shenna Bellows of Maine, Steve Simon of Minnesota, Francisco Aguilar of Nevada, Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico, Tobias Read of Oregon, Sarah Copeland Hanzas of Vermont, and Steve Hobbs of Washington.<\/p>\n

The secretaries fear Trump officials could misuse the information.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the administration collecting in an unprecedented way mass voter data and dumping it into an untested, unverified federal system to spread voter disinformation \u2013 disinformation to undermine our elections?\u201d Griswold said in an interview with Newsline.<\/p>\n

DHS operates Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which can identify the citizenship status of a person. The system can be prone to errors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would like to know what the Trump administration is doing with voter data, and I am proud to stand with nine other secretaries of state to demand answers and accountability,\u201d Griswold said. \u201cWe ultimately would like to know what the Trump administration is doing and whether they\u2019re taking appropriate steps required under the law to protect voter information.\u201d<\/p>\n

The secretaries of state met with senior DOJ and DHS officials twice, on Aug. 28 and Sept. 11, according to the letter. A DOJ official during the first meeting told the secretaries the department intended to use voter data \u201cto assess compliance with the voter list maintenance provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, Heather Honey, an election conspiracist who is a Homeland Security \u201celection integrity\u201d official, told the secretaries the department had not requested voter data and had no intention of using it, the letter says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe same day, DHS publicly contradicted her representation and confirmed that they had received this data and would input it into the unproven and potentially insecure citizenship-check system, SAVE,\u201d the letter says.<\/p>\n

The secretaries request details on the sharing of voter data between federal agencies, the security of the information, and contradictory statements by federal officials. They request a response by Dec. 1.<\/p>\n

Sweeping requests for information<\/div>\n

The DOJ has sent requests for voter data to at least 40 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The request to Colorado in May was among the most sweeping \u2013 it sought \u201call records\u201d related to the 2024 election, among other information.<\/p>\n

In response, Griswold\u2019s office supplied two copies of the state\u2019s master voter list \u2013 one from 2022 and one from May \u2013 and one copy of the master voter history list dating from after the election in November 2024. The data includes the names of voters, their residential addresses, birth year, and, if provided by the voter, phone numbers \u2013 all public information. It does not include a voter\u2019s social security number, driver\u2019s license number, month and day of birth, signature or email address.<\/p>\n

Other states, including Maine, refused to hand over any information. New Hampshire\u2019s Republican secretary of state David Scanlan, citing a state prohibition, said he wasn\u2019t authorized to provide the DOJ with his state\u2019s voter roll.<\/p>\n

Voters in Colorado are less vulnerable to misuse of their information than those in some other states, from which federal officials specifically requested sensitive information such as driver\u2019s licenses and social security numbers, Griswold said. But the voter data requests are just one of many ways the Trump administration has \u201cmade our elections less secure,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In March, Trump issued an executive order that, though a court has blocked key parts of it, would disenfranchise millions of Americans if it were implemented, according to voter advocates. The administration has dismantled federal entities that had worked to support election security or counter foreign election disinformation. It is attempting to eliminate mail-in ballots, which are used by virtually every voter in Colorado. It is trying to free Tina Peters, the election-denying former Mesa County clerk who is serving a prison term for her role in a scheme to breach the security of her own election equipment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think it\u2019s very important for elected officials to stand up whenever they can,\u201d Griswold said. \u201cIt\u2019s all these small situations that grow on top of each other, and we can\u2019t ignore what\u2019s happening at large. And in this situation, I\u2019m proud that 10 of us are coming together and saying we demand answers from Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem to shine light on whatever the Trump administration is doing with this data.\u201d<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Newsline, visit www.coloradonewsline.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secretaries of state raise questions with DOJ, DHS over voter data security<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[266,28,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-15593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-election","tag-headlines","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19739,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593\/revisions\/19739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15593"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=15593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}