Homeland asks DOJ to probe transfer of private state voter data to Zuckerberg-tied nonprofit

The Justice Department is being asked to investigate whether sensitive state voter data — including Social Security and driver's license numbers — was transferred to a nonprofit tied to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in violation of federal privacy laws, according to a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin released Friday by the White House. 

The Department of Homeland Security first brought its concerns to the Justice Department in September 2025, Secretary Mullin wrote to Attorney General Todd Blanche in a letter dated Wednesday. It is unclear what the Justice Department did with the original information. 

The new letter sent this week outlines what the agency believes is a possible violation of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act by the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit organization that helps states maintain the integrity of their voter rolls. 

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia are members of ERIC, which Mullin's letter stated contests that it did anything wrong. 

The problem, Mullin wrote, is that ERIC "exposes millions of citizens’ sensitive private data to unknown contractors, subcontractors and agents of ERIC–potentially in violation of the DPPA.” 

You can read the letter released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force below:

According to Mullin, ERIC “lobbies states to sign a contract that requires the disclosure of the private data of individuals who were not registered to vote and therefore certainly could not be in need of voter list maintenance. The data fields disclosed include Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers.” 

Later, ERIC turned over such sensitive data to at least one nonprofit organization, the Center for Election Innovation and Research – which has received millions in funding from a foundation founded by Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, the wife of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and has provided grants to state election officials who agreed to turn over the data. 

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

“​​This sharing and re-sharing of Motor Vehicle Agency data among NGOs may not qualify as a permissible use of motor vehicle data identified in the DPPA,” Mullin wrote. “This category of data regarding potential voters is incredibly valuable to political parties and campaigns.” 

Ahead of the 2020 election, Chan Zuckerberg's foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, provided more than $70 million in funding to CEIR, according to Mullin's letter.  

During the election, Zuckerberg’s foundation dumped more than $400 million into two nonprofits, CEIR and the Center for Tech & Civic Life, to provide grants to local and state election officials, respectively, in order to help them administer the 2020 election.

When CEIR announced the massive infusion of donations in October 2020, it said the money had come from both Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. "Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Increase Support for Safe and Reliable Voting," the announcement stated.

With that funding, CEIR gave grants to states under the Voter Education Grant Program to “provide nonpartisan, accurate, and official voting information to the public.” That year, 23 states and Washington, D.C., applied for and accepted grant funds from CEIR. 

“While a DOJ investigation could determine the final number of files involved, Homeland Security officials believe at least nine states engaged in the grant agreement authorizing the transfer of the data and those 9 states have over 48 million registered voters,” an administration official told Just the News. “Homeland believes the number transferred could be much higher since the number of individuals in each state’s Motor Vehicle database would exceed the registered voter number because it included motorists who had not registered to vote.”

The Homeland Security Department highlighted the terms of one such $13 million grant from CEIR to Pennsylvania that required the state to turn over motor vehicle data "originally shared with ERIC, to be used by CEIR to create” lists of eligible but unregistered voters that the organization could use for voter registration outreach. 

ERIC first came under scrutiny in 2022 when the Thomas More Society filed lawsuits against election departments in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and states that received grant funding from CEIR. 

The legal organization alleged that the states violated the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires states to maintain accurate lists of registered and unregistered voters but does not authorize states to share that information with third parties. The results of these early lawsuits are unclear. 

Homeland Security said that ERIC claimed that the disclosure of the data to CEIR was permitted under the research exception in federal statutes governing the privacy of personal information from state motor vehicle records. However, the statutes provide three requirements for this exception, that “the personal information is not published, re-disclosed or used to contact individuals.” 

Mullin told the Justice Department that his agency possesses evidence that ERIC contacted “eligible or possibly eligible” citizens who were not registered to vote. 

Additionally, email communications disclosed in a public records request in Georgia showed that “CEIR was ‘coordinating ERIC [eligible voter] outreach’ which was contacting each individual identified in the motor vehicle file,” Mullin wrote. 

A Trump administration official told reporters that the Justice Department could take various actions in response to the potential violations of the DPPA, including issuing a cease and desist to ERIC, imposing legal penalties, or exploring whether the nonprofit violated its 501(c)3 status.