57e3d4eb 46b6 4ec5 92d4 36955ca0cc65 · 25 questions

DOJ quietly offered states secret deals to purge voter rolls

The DOJ privately offered to purge voters from unverified federal lists — with no public notice required·December 18, 2025

In December 2025, the Trump Justice Department sent confidential memoranda of understanding to more than a dozen states, offering to flag "ineligible" voters using federal databases — including SAVE, SSA death records, and DHS data — and requiring states to remove those voters within 45 days. The Stateline investigation published December 18, 2025, revealed these deals were kept secret from the public. Eleven Republican-led states — Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia — expressed interest. Colorado and Wisconsin publicly rejected the deal and released the draft agreement text. States that accepted would bypass their own voter list maintenance laws, deny affected voters the notification and waiting period normally required, and hand the federal government unprecedented control over state voter rolls, a power the Constitution reserves to states.

Key facts

The DOJ sent confidential memoranda of understanding (MOUs) to more than a dozen states in late 2025 offering to identify ineligible voters using SAVE, SSA death records, and DHS databases

Eleven Republican-led states expressed interest: Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia

States accepting the MOU would be required to remove flagged voters within 45 days — bypassing the NVRA 90-day quiet period and standard notice-and-waiting procedures

Colorado and Wisconsin publicly rejected the deal and released the draft agreement text, triggering DOJ lawsuits against both states

The SAVE database cannot confirm citizenship for naturalized citizens who lack a USCIS certificate, people with acquired citizenship, or U.S.-born individuals not in SSA records

Kris Kobach Interstate Crosscheck program, the previous major federal purge effort, produced false positives more than 99% of the time before being shut down after security breaches