For years, Democratic states currently challenging the Trump administration's access to voter and motor vehicle driver data over privacy concerns have been turning that data over to a nonprofit accused by the Homeland Security Department of violating privacy laws.

The Justice Department has sued dozens of states since last fall to force them to hand over unredacted voter rolls, including driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, and several Democratic-led states have refused, citing privacy statutes and warning the data could be misused. 

But a letter Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent Attorney General Todd Blanche this week shows some of those same states have long belonged to a data-sharing consortium that funneled comparable motor vehicle records to a nonprofit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Mullin's letter, released by the White House on Friday, asks the Justice Department to investigate whether the Electronic Registration Information Center violated the Driver's Privacy Protection Act by disclosing Social Security and driver's license numbers to “unknown contractors, subcontractors and agents.” 

ERIC, Mullin wrote, later passed that data to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit co-founded by the same official who helped start ERIC and that is funded, in part, by a foundation run by Priscilla Chan and her husband, Zuckerberg.

ERIC and CEIR were each founded and organized by David Becker, a former government lawyer who later became a director for the progressive People for the American Way.

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia belong to ERIC, according to the group's own membership list. Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania, all Democratic-led states that have either sued the Trump administration or been sued by it this year over demands for unredacted voter files, are members of ERIC. 

The Justice Department has filed at least 31 lawsuits against 30 states and Washington, D.C., seeking full voter registration lists. Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania were among the six states the Justice Department sued in September 2025 after they refused to comply. Massachusetts was sued that December along with 17 other states. 

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said his office had asked the Justice Department for assurances that residents' data, including Social Security and driver's license numbers, would be protected before the state was sued, but the department "remained silent," he said.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has been similarly outspoken about federal access to voter data, telling constituents that no federal agency has "the right to your sensitive, private voter information," the Brennan Center noted in its lawsuit tracker. 

Yet, Benson credited a 2020 CEIR grant with helping drive down Michigan's ballot rejection rate that year, according to CEIR's own account of its Voter Education Grant Program, which distributed nearly $65 million to 23 states that year using Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funding.

Mullin's letter singles out another arrangement, with Pennsylvania, a $13 million CEIR grant that required the state to turn over motor vehicle data "originally shared with ERIC" so CEIR could build outreach lists of eligible but unregistered voters, Just the News reported on Friday. 

Mullin wrote that the disclosures may not fall under any of the narrow exceptions Congress carved into the federal statute governing motor vehicle privacy, which bars using the data to contact individuals. ERIC disputes any wrongdoing, according to Mullin's letter.

Federal judges in California, Michigan and Oregon have already dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuits, with the California judge calling the government's demand "unprecedented and illegal," according to NPR. 

But the ERIC-CEIR arrangement shows the same category of data, driver's license and Social Security numbers pulled from state motor vehicle agencies, moved through a private nonprofit network for years with far less public scrutiny than the Justice Department’s current demands have drawn, and in a way that may have violated privacy laws.