After a Border Patrol officer shot and killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday, Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi offered Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz with an opportunity to, in her phrases, “restore the rule of legislation” and “finish the chaos in Minnesota.”
The letter Bondi sent to Walz, a Democrat, learn like a ransom word. Among the many calls for? That the state instantly flip over its total voter file to the Division of Justice to “affirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices adjust to federal legislation.”
That request was “deeply disturbing,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, instructed HuffPost.
“The request about handing over voter rolls has nothing to do by any means with what’s happening in Minnesota,” Simon stated.
The letter is essentially the most concrete hyperlink between three of the driving authoritarian urges of President Donald Trump’s second time period, tying collectively his want for a mass deportation marketing campaign with little respect for the rule of legislation; his push to punish dissent and protesters like Pretti, who was observing ICE exercise when he was shot; and his want to grab management of the nation’s decentralized election system or, as he has quipped, “cancel the election.”
The demand supplied a brand new face on the administration’s assault on Minneapolis and any future municipality that doesn’t bend the knee: adjust to Trump’s orders — together with ones courts would possibly in any other case deem unlawful — if you need the violent paramilitary to depart.
Minnesota has already rejected Bondi’s calls for.
“The reply to her request is not any,” Simon stated. “And we don’t respect this ransom word for the state of Minnesota, implying that the worth of our safety and freedom and stability is at hand over personal, private voter knowledge in violation of state and federal legislation.”
John McDonnell by way of Related Press
However this isn’t more likely to be the final such demand. The Justice Division started requesting such voter registration knowledge from states in June 2025 — a complete that now reaches 44 states and Washington, D.C., together with Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eleven states, all run by Republicans, said they might comply, whereas the opposite states, together with many run by Republicans, refused, noting that it could be unlawful for them at hand over such delicate knowledge and privateness considerations about what the info could be used for, or just supplied their publicly out there voter file. In response, the Justice Division sued 23 states and D.C., together with Minnesota and several other led by Republicans like Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire, to get a court docket to require that they hand over the info.
One cause why Bondi has now tied calls for for this knowledge to the administration’s roving assaults on municipalities run by Democrats is that these lawsuits aren’t going effectively. On Jan. 14, a federal choose issued a rare ruling from the bench dismissing the Justice Division’s case towards Oregon. The subsequent day, one other federal choose issued a scathing opinion dismissing the case towards California whereas calling the request “unprecedented and unlawful.” A 3rd case towards Georgia was dismissed by a federal judge for being filed within the fallacious jurisdiction on Jan. 23.
In its court docket filings, the administration claimed that it might get hold of these voter data as a result of it wanted to see if states had been complying with necessities within the Nationwide Voter Registration Act and the Assist America Vote Act round voter file upkeep. The administration additionally argued that the Civil Rights Act allowed it to acquire any election report to find out if a state was complying with federal legal guidelines defending the correct to vote.
In court docket, Justice Division attorneys have refused to supply any cause that they want the voter file knowledge or what they’ll do with it.
“At no level have they stated both we’ve got cause to imagine that they’re violating any federal legislation, together with HAVA or the NVRA, nor have they stated we’re investigating a violation of the correct to vote,” stated Elisabeth Frost, an legal professional with Elias Regulation Group, which represents teams and people who’ve joined the voter file circumstances on the facet of the states.
However statements by the department and its top officials clarify that the division will hand over the info to the Division of Homeland Safety to scan for potential noncitizens or use it for different immigration enforcement-related functions. This might end result within the elimination of 100,000 voters from the rolls, Assistant Lawyer Basic for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said on Newsmax in December.
Whereas this will take away the infinitesimally small variety of noncitizens who’ve registered to vote, it should additionally purge giant numbers of U.S. residents who’re legally registered. This has happened in state after state the place elected officers attempt to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls, and it has already happened to citizens from the states which can be complying with Trump’s request for full voter file knowledge.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu by way of Getty Photos
The administration might additionally undermine future elections through the use of this knowledge to allow the mass difficult of voters’ registrations akin to what the election-denying group True The Vote did in Georgia in 2020.
“If they’ll amass this info, what they need to do with it’s form of like a DOGE database factor the place they put all of it and what spits out of it are a bunch of various names of people who they’re going to say shouldn’t be voting,” Frost stated.
This could be essentially the most quick use the administration would put to state voter recordsdata, nevertheless it doubtless wouldn’t be the one one. The requests come as Trump has sought to grab management of elections from the states by way of a collection of government orders that presupposed to unilaterally alter election legal guidelines. This regardless of the Structure inserting the facility of regulating elections within the palms of the states and Congress, not the president.
“It’s only one extra instance of the all-out assault we’re seeing on the correct of states to run elections and extra broadly than that on all of the mechanisms that make democracy work,” stated Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Learn, who’s a Democrat. “It actually provides as much as a president and an administration that doesn’t need to have free and truthful elections.”
And there are much more harmful ways in which state voter file knowledge might be used to undermine free and truthful elections.
“You’ll be able to’t flip your eyes away from what’s taking place in Minneapolis and the information reporting that’s popping out of there,” Frost stated. “ICE is utilizing knowledge from all types of sources to attempt to observe individuals. The state voter registration data maintain a wealth of details about People that’s a lot, far more updated than what the federal authorities has. It additionally holds quite a lot of details about how usually individuals vote. You might use it to focus on people who find themselves extra more likely to vote for events you wouldn’t like them to be voting for.”
Bondi’s mob-like provide to Minnesota — if it had been accepted — might have then been used to additional speed up the administration’s authoritarian immigration enforcement campaigns of retribution. This leaves these answerable for elections having to deal with the federal authorities as a possible menace.
With the Trump administration seemingly in a strategic retreat from the state, the quick menace to Minnesota could also be fading. However Simon stated election officers want to organize for the beforehand unthinkable.
“It makes lots of people nervous concerning the elections this November,” Simon stated. “Our workplace is actively planning for eventualities that may contain direct or oblique interference with the administration of elections by the federal authorities.”
