A Delray Beach, Florida, police officer speaks to a driver in 2019. The Trump administration wants to gain access to state driver’s license data through a computer network used by law enforcement to share records across state lines. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Four Republican states have agreed to help the Trump administration gain access to states’ driver’s license data through a nationwide law enforcement computer network as part of the government’s hunt for suspected non-citizen voters.
As recently as October, the Trump administration said federal officials wanted to obtain driver’s license records through the network.
The commitment from officials in Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio is part of a settlement agreement filed Friday in a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit was originally filed by the states last year and claims the Biden administration has not done enough to help states verify voter eligibility.
The settlementThe agreement between the states and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires the federal department to continue development of a powerful citizenship verification program called SAVE. Earlier this year, federal officials repurposed SAVE into a program that can search millions of state voter rolls for registered noncitizen voters.
In return, states have agreed to support the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to access the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, an undiscovered computer network that typically allows law enforcement agencies to search driver’s license records across state lines. Nlets — as the system is called — allows law enforcement officers to easily view the driving records of out-of-state drivers.
The Trump administration and some Republican election officials have promoted the changes to SAVE as a useful tool for identifying potential non-citizen voters, and Indiana had already done so agreed Providing electoral rolls. Critics, including some Democrats, say the Trump administration is building a extensive database of U.S. citizens that President Donald Trump or a future president could apply to spy or target political enemies.
State border reported last weekBefore the settlement agreement was filed in court, Homeland Security publicly confirmed that it wanted to combine Nlets with SAVE.
A notice published in the Federal Register on Oct. 31 said that driver’s licenses are the most widely used form of identification and that SAVE, through collaboration with state and national authorities, including Nlets, “will use driver’s license and state identification card numbers to verify and confirm identity information.”
A federal official previously said at a virtual meeting of state election officials in May that Homeland Security wanted to “avoid connecting to 50 state databases” and wanted a “simpler solution,” according to Nlets Government documents released from the transparency group American Oversight.
The fresh settlement lays out the timeline for how the Trump administration could obtain the four states’ records.
Within 90 days of the agreement’s effective date, the four states may provide Homeland Security with 1,000 randomly selected driver’s license records from their state for review as part of a quality improvement process for SAVE.
According to the agreement, states providing the records will (*4*) and state driver’s license agencies.
Language in the agreement is open-ended and does not make clear whether the commitment to help Homeland Security gain access to Nlets is restricted to drivers from those four states or whether it would require states to help the agency obtain the records of drivers nationwide.
An agreement to help
The agreement could pave the way for Republican officials in other states to provide access to licensing data.
Nlets is a nonprofit organization that facilitates data sharing between law enforcement agencies across state lines. States decide what information is made available through Nlets and which authorities can access it. That means the four states could try to get their counterparts to share Nlets data with the Trump administration.
“They’re not just talking about driver’s license numbers, they’re talking about driver’s records. What possible reason would DHS have in an election or voting context – or any context for that matter – for wanting ‘full use of state driver’s license records,'” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, said in a statement to Stateline that the settlement agreement represents another layer of election integrity and protection as officials want to ensure only eligible voters are registered to vote. He did not directly address questions about Nlets’ access.
“The SAVE program provides us with important information, but we must continue to use information from other state and federal partners to maintain clean and accurate lists,” Pate said in the statement.
Two weeks before the November 5, 2024 election, Pate gave instructions to Iowa county auditors to challenge the ballots of 2,176 registered voters identified by the Secretary of State’s office as potential non-citizens. Voters reported to the state Department of Transportation or another government agency that they were not U.S. citizens within the past 12 years and then registered to vote, the guidelines said.
In MarchPate said his office gained access to the SAVE database and found that 277 of those people were proven not to have U.S. citizenship – nearly 12% of the people identified as potential non-citizens.
What possible reason would DHS have in an election or voting context—or whatever context—for obtaining “full use of state driver’s license records”?
– David Becker, Managing Director, Center for Election Innovation & Research
Homeland Security and the U.S. Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the Homeland Security agency that oversees SAVE — told Stateline last week that USCIS is committed to “removing obstacles to securing the country’s electoral process.”
“By enabling states to efficiently verify voter eligibility, we strengthen the principle that America’s elections are exclusively for American citizens,” Tragesser said in a statement.
The SAVE program — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — was originally intended to help state and local officials verify the immigration status of individual noncitizens applying for federal benefits. In the past, SAVE could only search for one name. Now It can perform bulk searches; Federal officials also linked the program to Social Security data in May.
“It’s a potentially dangerous mix to distribute information about driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth … where we don’t really know yet how, when and where they will be used,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview Monday.
Democratic states protest
As the Trump administration has encouraged states to apply SAVE, the Justice Department has also required states to provide the department with unredacted copies of their voter rolls. The Trump administration has previously confirmed that the Justice Department is sharing voter information with Homeland Security.
The Justice Department has sued six, mostly Democratic, states for refusing to release the data. These lawsuits are still pending.
On Monday, twelve secretaries of state submitted a 29-page public comment in response to SAVE’s Federal Register notice criticizing the revision. The secretaries wrote that while Homeland Security maintains that the changes make the program an effective voter verification tool, the changes are “likely to weaken, not strengthen, states’ efforts to ensure free, fair, and secure elections.”
“The modified system will allow the federal government to collect sensitive data from hundreds of millions of voters across the country and distribute that information as it sees fit,” the ministers wrote.
The secretaries of state of California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington joined the commentary.
The settlement agreement is intended to make this year’s changes to SAVE legally binding.
The agreement requires a federal court to retain jurisdiction over the case for 20 years to enforce it — a move that could, in theory, make it harder for a future Democratic president to undo the changes to SAVE.
But Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he doesn’t expect the settlement agreement to make it harder for a future administration to undo the reform.
“If another administration came along that disagreed with this approach,” Becker said, “I would expect that they would almost certainly completely change how the system works, how states can access it and what data the federal government acquires.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter Robin Opsahl contributed to this report. Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman available at jshorman@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by State borderwhich is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes West Virginia Watch, and is a 501c(3) public charity supported by grants and a coalition of donors.
