Updated June 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM EDT
The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an unprecedented amount of election data from at least one state, according to documents obtained by NPR, as the DOJ transformed by the Trump administration reviews cases targeting the president's political allies and caters to his desire to exert more power over state voting processes.
On May 12, the Justice Department asked Colorado's secretary of state to turn over "all records" relating to 2024 federal elections, as well as preserve any records that remain from the 2020 election — a sprawling request several voting experts and officials told NPR was highly unusual and concerning, given President Trump's false claims about elections.
"What they're going to do with all this data, I don't know," said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. "But I'm sure they will use it to push their ridiculous disinformation and lies to the American public."
The request could be interpreted to include voter registration materials, ballots and voting equipment, much of which is retained by counties, not the secretary of state. But if Colorado were to produce all records from the 2024 general and primary elections, they "would fill Mile High Stadium," said David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who worked in the Voting Section during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
"It would be an enormous amount of information, and it's very unlikely the DOJ would even know what to do with all of that," said Becker, who now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR). "This appears more like a fishing expedition than it does some kind of targeted investigation."
Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who oversees voting as the secretary of state in neighboring New Mexico, told NPR that she had never heard of such a massive request from the Justice Department in her almost-20-year career working in elections.
"I've never heard of anything like that," said Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. "To my knowledge, this is the first of its kind of request."
The demand indicated that the Justice Department received a complaint about Colorado's election records retention, but it's not clear who filed the complaint or what the issue was. The department declined to comment or provide the complaint when asked about it by NPR.
Request may be tied to Colorado's prosecution of a Trump ally
Griswold and other election officials in Colorado suspect the letter to be in some way tied to the state's prosecution of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has become a folk hero among those who still deny the 2020 election results.
Peters is serving a 9-year sentence for crimes related to helping an unauthorized person gain access to voting equipment, and as part of her defense, she accused the secretary of state of ordering an illegal deletion of records, though that accusation has never been found credible. A week before the DOJ sent the letter to Colorado, Trump posted online that Peters was an "innocent Political Prisoner," and that the Justice Department should "take all necessary action" to help free her. Earlier, in March, the department submitted a filing in federal court to argue for Peters to be freed while she appeals her state conviction.
Nothing in the letter explicitly mentions Peters or the case, but Matt Crane, a Republican former county clerk in Colorado, said it was the first thing he thought of when he heard about the request.
"That was the first thing that came to mind, especially when some of the cases where she said she was just backing up election records and … saying that these records should have been retained," said Crane, who is now executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. "I think it's in part connected to Tina." He added that he disagreed with Peters' actions and arguments and is not aware of wrongdoing by Griswold's office on record preservation.
This data demand is signed by Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ Civil Rights Division, which has undergone a radical transformation as it shifts its mission to enforcing Trump's executive orders. The division's Voting Section has dropped voting rights lawsuits begun during the Biden administration and is now prioritizing searching for voter fraud.
Its new mandate includes enforcing Trump's March 25 executive order on voting, which calls for the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency — which initiated a controversial project amassing Americans' data across federal agencies — to review state voter rolls.
Dhillon, who was confirmed in her new role April 3, previously served as a legal adviser to Trump's 2020 presidential campaign and Kari Lake's 2022 gubernatorial election bid in Arizona, both of which involved unfounded conspiracy theorizing about voting.
Griswold, Colorado's secretary of state, told NPR that while she's sure the data in question would only show Colorado elections are secure, she's worried the unusual records request could be part of an effort to sow doubt about American elections.
"We are seeing them use the apparatus of the federal government to undermine our elections and our democracy," Griswold said. "And I would assume that this is more of the same."
A request to "send us everything"
In recent weeks, the DOJ's Voting Section has accused states, including North Carolina, Arizona and Oregon, of inadequately verifying voters' identities or not doing enough to maintain accurate voter rolls.
The DOJ's records request to Colorado, however, so far stands out in its breadth.
The letter says "we recently received a complaint alleging noncompliance by your office" with election administration duties outlined in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, and requests "all records" to evaluate the complaint.
"I've never seen a request that says, 'You have a responsibility to keep everything. We're investigating whether you kept everything. So send us everything,'" said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. He also served as a White House senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights during the Biden administration.
Becker, the former DOJ attorney who's now with CEIR, said he initially didn't believe the Justice Department could actually be requesting all election records from a state, but in a follow-up correspondence between Colorado and the Justice Department, acting Voting Section chief Maureen Riordan reiterated the request in clearer terms.
"We are requesting all records that are available for the federal elections that fall within the specified 22 months that are in your possession," she wrote, according to an email exchange viewed by NPR.
Under federal law, election officials must preserve records for 22 months after a federal election.
Riordan acknowledged that the 22-month window had passed for the 2020 election, but wrote, "If you still have those records from the 2020 federal elections in your possession we are requesting preservation of those records."
Colorado responded on May 27 by providing the Justice Department with a current version of its publicly available voter file, a historical one capturing what the file looked like roughly two years ago, as well as a dataset showing voter history.
It is not clear whether the Justice Department will be satisfied with that response.
Both Becker and Levitt noticed some other oddities in the initial DOJ request as well, including numerous typos. The letter refers to Colorado as a "commonwealth" even though it is a state, and it erroneously requested the state preserve records from the 2000 general election instead of 2020.
"Normally T's are crossed and I's dotted at the Department of Justice long before a letter like this goes out," Levitt said. "So I have questions about the substance, but I also have questions about the care with which they are proceeding with investigations and safeguarding materials that they receive — because the indications here are that things are coming off the rails a little bit."
Levitt also questioned whether the Justice Department is complying with public notice procedures that federal privacy law requires whenever the federal government obtains a new dataset that includes names or other identifying information.
A Justice Department spokesperson who declined to be named told NPR the department "is in full compliance with the Privacy Act and other federal laws that protect against the disclosure of personally identifiable information."
Certain sections of the Justice Department have seen an exodus of lawyers under the Trump administration. NPR has reported that as of the end of May, about 70% of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division attorneys had left their jobs.
Riordan, on the other hand, recently rejoined the DOJ, where she previously spent a large chunk of career, according to her LinkedIn profile. Riordan's last position was at the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has filed many lawsuits against states it argues have not maintained their voter lists aggressively enough to guard against potential fraud.
Multiple Dhillon requests
The Justice Department letter to Colorado isn't the only broad records request state officials have received in recent months.
On March 25 — the same day Trump signed his voting executive order — the Dhillon Law Group, the law firm Harmeet Dhillon founded and worked at until her April 3 Senate confirmation, sent 48 states and Washington, D.C., expansive voter list records requests. The letter, which was signed by a Dhillon Law Group partner, was sent on behalf of the Republican National Committee, a client of the firm.
The requests ask for detailed information, including the names of voters who were removed for various reasons and communications with outside agencies.
The RNC told NPR in a statement that the organization plans to use the data to review "how states remove ineligible voters … and will use this information to hold states accountable and promote greater transparency in our elections."
Voting experts say it is an unusual situation to have an assistant attorney general whose former firm is sending records requests that overlap with DOJ requests to states.
"All of a sudden now there's these really gray lines between her private firm and the government here," said Crane, of the Colorado County Clerks Association. "That seems a little odd to me."
The Justice Department spokesperson told NPR in an email that Dhillon was in compliance with all ethical guidelines, including recusing herself and being "ethically screened" from matters involving her former firm. Dhillon Law Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Levitt said while it was not "inherently improper" for Dhillon's former firm to be engaging in these requests, "It wouldn't surprise me at all if election officials were wondering whether this private request were in fact being used improperly to feed a government investigation. In part because there have been no assurances whatsoever that this administration keeps the private sector private and the public sector public."
New Mexico received a request from the RNC through Dhillon Law Group, and Toulouse Oliver — the state's Democratic secretary of state — said she worries how the data the state sends back will be used.
"I could envision a situation for a non-nefarious purpose [for gathering this data]," she said. "It's just given the rhetoric and given the [executive orders] that have already been ordered and things like that, it's hard to believe that that's the intention."
She said she is now also preparing her staff in case New Mexico gets a DOJ request like Colorado.
"I think we're all deeply concerned about — are we gonna be going back to 2020, you know, and relitigating 2020 all over again?" Toulouse Oliver said. "There's just a lot of uncertainty and we're all worried that we're going to get targeted, and in what way that is going to manifest itself."
Have information you want to share about voting or elections? Reach out to these authors through encrypted communication on Signal. Miles Parks is at milesparks.10 and Jude Joffe-Block is at JudeJB.10. Please use a nonwork device.
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