Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued California, along with 22 other states and Washington, D.C., for access to their full, unredacted voter files. That includes driver's license, social security numbers and other sensitive data. DOJ officials said they needed the data to assess whether states were properly maintaining their voter rolls and ensuring "only American citizens are voting, only one time," as Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a social media post in December.
The 11 states "all fall into the list of, they have expressed with us a willingness to comply based on the represented MOU that we have sent them," Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section, said at the hearing. He spoke at a Dec. 4 hearing in a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against California, which has refused a demand for the state's voter data.
