DHS Asks DOJ to Revisit ERIC Voter-Data Practices and Election-System Concerns

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has asked Attorney General Todd Blanche to review unresolved federal concerns involving ERIC’s handling of motor-vehicle data, its past relationship with CEIR and separate questions surrounding barcode-based voting systems.

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has returned a series of election-related concerns to the Justice Department, asking newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche to review questions involving private access to state motor-vehicle and voter-registration information as well as the use of barcode and QR-code technology in voting systems.

The request is contained in a Sept. 2, 2026, letter from Mullin to Blanche. The White House subsequently published the letter as part of its election-integrity materials, describing it as addressing possible improper sharing of sensitive voter information.

Mullin wrote that DHS officials had already raised the data-sharing issues with Justice Department officials in September 2025. His new request asks DOJ to determine whether practices involving the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, and the Center for Election Innovation and Research, or CEIR, comply with federal law. The letter itself does not establish that either organization violated the law, nor does it identify an existing criminal charge or final legal determination.

ERIC is a nonprofit membership organization created and governed by participating state election officials. States use the system to compare voter-registration and motor-vehicle information in an effort to identify outdated registrations, possible duplicate records, deceased voters and people believed to be eligible but not registered.

Mullin’s central concern involves the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which restricts disclosure and use of personal information maintained by state motor-vehicle agencies.

The letter states that ERIC “exposes millions of citizens’ sensitive private data to unknown contractors, subcontractors, and agents of ERIC,” an allegation Mullin said raises potential questions under the federal privacy statute.

ERIC, however, says sensitive identifiers submitted by member states, including Social Security and driver’s license information, are cryptographically hashed rather than transmitted in human-readable form. The organization also says its eligible-but-unregistered reports do not contain Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers or state identification numbers and that only ERIC employees process member data.

Mullin’s letter focuses in particular on information used to identify people classified as eligible but unregistered, or EBU.

“Prior to the 2020 election, ERIC shared that sensitive, protected motor-vehicle data with at least one other private organization. The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) received over $70 million from the Chan Zuckerberg 501(c)(3) organization, which was used to provide grants to state election officials who agreed to turn over sensitive private data to CEIR. This sharing and resharing of Motor Vehicle Agency data among NGOs may not qualify as a permissible use of motor-vehicle data identified in the DPPA. This category of data regarding potential voters is incredibly valuable to political parties and campaigns.

“A primary function of ERIC appears to be identifying individuals who are potentially eligible to vote but who are currently unregistered. All eligible but unregistered (EBU) individuals identified in the state motor vehicle database are contacted and encouraged to register. The list of EBUs is created by comparing information from the statewide voter registration database to the list of all individuals in the state motor vehicle database.

“According to publicly available reporting, in 2020, Pennsylvania’s $13 million grant agreement from CEIR included the following terms: ‘Grantee agrees to cooperate with CEIR, including providing data, as CEIR reasonably requests.’ The data requested included state motor vehicle data, originally shared with ERIC, to be used by CEIR to create the EBU lists for outreach. ERIC acknowledged that the EBU list is created using data that is protected by the DPPA.

“The ERIC model contract requires states to share ‘all licensing or identification records from motor vehicle departments’ at least every 60 days. Despite the fact taht the MVA data will be used to identify EBUs, the model contract prohibits states from sharing data related to citizenship. The ERIC model contract provides that ‘[u]nder no circumstances shall the Member transmit an individual’s record where the record contains documentation or other information indicating that the individual is a non-citizen of the United States.’”

ERIC itself acknowledges that its eligible-but-unregistered reports are generated using motor-vehicle department information and that those reports contain data protected by the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. ERIC maintains that disclosure is permissible only when an applicable statutory exception is satisfied.

Mullin’s letter also revisits the relationship between ERIC and CEIR.

David Becker played a role in developing ERIC while serving at the Pew Charitable Trusts and later founded CEIR in 2016. Becker previously served in a nonvoting role connected with ERIC while leading CEIR. CEIR describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on election administration and voter participation.

The organizations’ relationship has drawn particular attention because CEIR received substantial private funding during the 2020 election cycle and distributed grants to states for voter education.

CEIR says its 2020 program distributed nearly $65 million among 23 states for public information campaigns involving voting options, polling locations, election hours and changes arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Pennsylvania received approximately $13.26 million through the program.

According to the figures cited in the material provided, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia were four of the six largest recipients of CEIR funding, along with New York and New Jersey. Those four battleground states averaged approximately $8.75 million each, compared with about $1.58 million for the remaining 19 recipient states.

Michigan’s arrangement was unusual because the grant went through the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration, or MCELA, rather than directly to the Secretary of State’s office.

MCELA had been founded by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson years before she took statewide office. In 2020, the organization received approximately $11.9 million from CEIR and reported paying about $9.8 million to Waterfront Strategies and approximately $2.1 million to Alper Strategies for media strategy services, according to tax information subsequently cited by a House Ways and Means Committee document.

The two firms had Democratic political connections. Waterfront Strategies is associated with GMMB, while Alper Strategies was founded by Jill Alper, a former Democratic National Committee political director.

Then-MCELA President Jen McKernan explained in a 2020 Michigan Public interview that the voter-education effort would provide information about voting rules and procedures and seek to counter misinformation. CEIR’s later report said Michigan used targeted communications for voters, including outreach to people who had not yet returned mail ballots.

The material provided also describes a system under which people could be removed from text-message outreach after election records indicated their ballots had been returned. That feature has generated questions about the voter data available to organizations conducting the campaign, though the existence of voter-status targeting does not by itself establish improper access to protected information.

CEIR has disputed Mullin’s broader characterization of its handling of data.

Becker said Friday that CEIR does not continuously receive voter or motor-vehicle information, does not require states receiving grants to provide sensitive data and does not use such information for partisan purposes. He said DHS had not contacted CEIR for clarification before sending the letter and said the organization would cooperate in explaining its research.

CEIR says the data project at issue involved research into whether state outreach to people identified as eligible but unregistered resulted in additional registrations. Election officials in participating states sent the outreach and subsequently supplied information for the study, according to the organization.

Mullin’s concerns also extend to a 2022 incident in Colorado involving approximately 30,000 noncitizens who mistakenly received voter-registration notices.

The letter states:

“This problem has had direct implications for our efforts to prevent alien voting. In 2022, the ERIC EBU list included 30,000 non-citizens in the State of Colorado. These 30,000 non-citizens received invitations to register from the Colorado Secretary of State. The state later identified the error and ‘applied several efforts to prevent or reject anyone not eligible to vote from registering.’ We have serious concerns about the potential for alien registration across other states.”

Colorado officials acknowledged at the time that postcards encouraging voter registration were mistakenly sent to roughly 30,000 noncitizens because of a database error involving residents with driver’s licenses. State officials said safeguards remained in place to prevent ineligible recipients from successfully registering. There was no allegation in Mullin’s letter that those 30,000 people actually registered or voted.

The episode is significant to Mullin’s argument because ERIC’s model agreement restricts member states from transmitting records that contain information showing an individual is not a U.S. citizen, even though motor-vehicle data are used in producing lists of people considered potentially eligible but unregistered.

Mullin contends that the interaction between those requirements deserves federal scrutiny, particularly when voter-registration outreach is based on motor-vehicle records.

The Sept. 2 referral also encompasses separate DHS questions about voting equipment that produces barcode or QR-code records. Mullin has asked DOJ to review whether such systems provide a sufficiently reliable record for manual audits and whether their use complies with applicable federal requirements.

The Justice Department has not publicly announced a finding that ERIC, CEIR or the states involved violated the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act as a result of the concerns described in Mullin’s letter.

That distinction leaves the latest development at the review stage: DHS has identified practices it believes warrant legal examination, while ERIC and CEIR maintain that their data practices are structured to comply with federal law.

More than a year after DHS officials say they first brought the issues to DOJ, Mullin’s letter places the questions before Blanche and asks the department to determine whether the election-data arrangements, privacy protections and related voting-system practices comply with federal law.