LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Trump administration is seeking Kentucky voters’ personal information from state election officials as a part of an effort to ensure voter roll compliance and collect data on voters across the country.

Kentucky has yet to comply with the request, citing concerns about giving away more than 3.3 million voters’ sensitive information, including the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

The Trump administration has not taken legal against Kentucky as of Dec. 29, but the Department of Justice has sued other states that haven’t turned over the data.

Emails and proposed agreements obtained from the State Board of Elections by the Herald-Leader through the Kentucky Open Records Act show the dialogue has been ongoing since summer. It ramped up in December with top Trump administration officials pushing the board to hand over the information, claiming they need to evaluate Kentucky’s compliance with federal voter list maintenance requirements.

Scrutiny over how states administer their elections has been a common theme for President Donald Trump and his allies since 2020, when the president lost a reelection bid to Joe Biden and pressured one secretary of state to “find votes” to help him win. Since then, he has routinely claimed without evidence that he actually won the election.

Officials with the DOJ first formally requested the information from Kentucky in an Aug. 14 email from Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, a longtime Trump ally and pick for the post.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections. The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration,” Dhillon wrote in a Dec. 29 statement to the Herald-Leader.

Throughout the back-and-forth, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams and officials with the State Board of Elections have balked at the prospect of divulging voters’ personally identifiable information.

Kentucky State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Sellers sent federal officials the voter file without any Social Security or driver’s license information Oct. 15.

“Given that SBE has not received the requested clarification as to how DOJ is complying with its requirements under both the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Driver’s License Protection Act, I will not be able to provide you with a statewide voter registration list containing driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers at this time,” Sellers wrote in an email accompanying the file.

Still, members of the Trump administration have persisted in their requests for those details.

According to a proposed memorandum of understanding sent by Eric Neff, head of the Department of Justice’s voting section, on Dec. 2, the DOJ is seeking the following on more than 3.3 million Kentucky voters: names, dates of birth, addresses and driver’s license numbers or last four digits of Social Security numbers.

It would also require the state to make corrections to any identified noncompliance with federal voter roll laws within 45 days.

Neff requested compliance to the memorandum within seven days in that email. The memorandum was labeled “confidential,” requesting that “this MOU, its contents, and the drafts and communications leading up to the execution of this MOU” remain secret to the extent allowable by law. The Herald-Leader was able to obtain the memo through requests made under the Kentucky Open Records Act.

Nearly a month has passed, and the State Board of Elections, who has ultimate authority over what happens to Kentucky voter data, has taken no action.

The group, chaired by Adams but consisting of eight other governor-appointed members — four Democrats and four Republicans — did not vote on the matter in its recent Dec. 16 meeting.

“It’s not, ultimately, my call,” Adams told the Herald-Leader in a recent interview. “It’s going to be their call, and there’s four Democrats and four Republicans… They’re all appointed by the governor, who, separately, is in federal court, suing to stop the administration from getting personal information for SNAP recipients.”

A spokesperson for the DOJ did not offer any comment on its plans for litigation, but emphasized the federal government has the power to “ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.”

Origins of the data request

On March 25, 2025, two months after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order directing certain federal agencies to overhaul and take control of major parts of the nation’s election systems.

One line in the order directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “take appropriate action with respect to States that fail to comply with the list maintenance requirements of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act,” both of the laws cited in the DOJ’s requests to Kentucky.

The Republican National Committee, through Dhillon’s law firm, sent Kentucky and other states a request for records related to voter list maintenance the same day the executive order was issued. A week later, Graves Garrett Greim, a conservative firm representing a group that has made unsupported claims of mass voter fraud, made a similar request.

For months after Dhillon’s Aug. 14 request for voter information, including driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, the DOJ went quiet. The State Board of Elections responded twice in August and once again Oct. 15, with no response.

The second request for the information, this time with the proposed memorandum of understanding, came from Neff on Dec. 2.

Kentucky’s posture

Kentucky has not been fully defiant of the Trump administration, like many of the 21 states it is suing to get the voter information. But it hasn’t wholly complied, either.

That’s in part because of some gray area in the law. Generally speaking, the U.S. Constitution allows states to run their own elections. But the federal agencies seeking the states’ voter information are citing certain federal laws like the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act to say they should have access.

“We’ve never had a request like this before, to my knowledge, in state history,” Adams said.

“We have federal laws that are broad, and we have state laws that are broad, and it’s not exactly clear which is more precise and which controls generally,” he said. “We’ve thought about this. We’ve researched it. This has been going on since the summer, and we’ve been going back and forth respectfully with the DOJ.”

Adams predicts states that haven’t sent any data to the federal government will lose, as the kind of information Kentucky sent to the federal government is regularly sent to political organizations and other interested parties. States in Kentucky’s position are in a murkier place, though, he said.

“You can’t just withhold everything and say ‘hashtag resistance.’ You still have to follow the law, even if you don’t like the administration. But, the question of whether the federal government gets individual voter private information is just not a well-resolved question,” Adams said.

Adams said he wasn’t sure whether or not the federal government would sue Kentucky soon, or if they would wait to get better precedent in their other lawsuits to do so.

The Department of Justice has yet to respond to questions about their intentions for legal action or responses to questions from the State Board of Elections.

What could the federal government do with the data?

The express intent for the request for Kentucky voters’ information is to check if the state’s voter rolls comply with federal standards.

Some are concerned the data could be used for more than that.

The DOJ is sharing the voter roll information it collects with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a statement to the outlet Stateline, a representative of the Department of Homeland Security said the data sharing would “critically enable DHS to prevent illegal aliens from corrupting our republic’s democratic process and further ensure the integrity of our elections nationwide.”

The Department of Homeland Security runs a database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, which was originally built to assess whether government benefits applicants were eligible citizens but has grown to include voter roll analysis.

Some Trump opponents are worried the uses for the voter data could grow even more expansive, pointing to other Trump administration initiatives.

On March 20, five days before his executive order on the nation’s election systems, Trump issued another executive order calling for more data sharing across federal government agencies.

The administration later tapped Palantir, a data analysis and intelligence company founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, as the chief contractor for that effort. Though some have raised concerns the company could help the government create a “master list” of personal information on Americans, increasing the state’s surveillance power, Palantir has denied doing so.

A dozen Democratic secretaries of state sounded the alarm over the data’s integration into the SAVE program in a Dec. 1 letter to Department of Homeland Security leadership.

They argued sharing the data would amount to a federal overreach and the creation of many privacy risks without an obvious benefit, given non-citizen voting is extraordinarily rare. The program has already flagged some citizen voters as “potential non-citizens.”

“What the modified system will do… is allow the federal government to capture sensitive data on hundreds of millions of voters nationwide and distribute that information as it sees fit. It will facilitate the federal administration’s attempt to claim for itself states’ authority to regulate and administer elections,” the secretaries of state wrote.

“It threatens to expose hundreds of millions of Americans’ private data to cyberattack and misuse.”

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