The Trump administrations

After a Border Patrol officer shot and killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi presented Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with the opportunity to, in her words, “restore the rule of law” and “end the chaos in Minnesota.”

The letter Bondi sent to Walz, a Democrat, looked like a ransom note. Among the demands? That the state immediately turn over its entire voter records to the Department of Justice to “confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”

That request was “deeply disturbing,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told News themezone.

“The request regarding the release of voter lists has nothing to do with what is happening in Minnesota,” Simon said.

The letter is the most concrete link between three of the authoritarian impulses that fueled President Donald Trump’s second term, uniting his desire for a mass deportation campaign with little respect for the rule of law; his push to punish dissent and protesters like Pretti, who was observing ICE activity when he was shot; and his desire to take control of the country’s decentralized electoral system or, as he has joked, “cancel the elections.”

The lawsuit provided a new face to the administration’s attack on Minneapolis and any future municipality that doesn’t bend the knee: comply with Trump’s orders – including those that courts could consider illegal – if the violent paramilitaries are to go away.

Minnesota has already rejected Bondi’s demands.

“The answer to your request is no,” Simon said. “And we do not appreciate this ransom note to the state of Minnesota, which implies that the price of our security, freedom and stability is handing over private and personal voter data in violation of state and federal laws.”

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But this is not likely to be the last such lawsuit. The Justice Department began requesting such voter registration data from states in June 2025, a total that now reaches 44 states and Washington, D.C., including Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eleven states, all run by Republicans, declared they would comply, while the other states, including many run by Republicans, refused, noting that it would be illegal for them to hand over such sensitive data and privacy concerns about what the data would be used for, or simply provide their publicly available voter file. In response, the Justice Department sued 23 states and DC, including Minnesota and several Republican-led ones such as Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire, to get a court to require them to hand over the data.

One of the reasons Bondi has now linked demands for this data to the administration’s errant attacks on Democratic-governed municipalities is that those demands are not going well. On January 14, a federal judge issued a rare ruling dismissing the Justice Department’s case against Oregon. The next day, another federal judge issued a scathing opinion dismissing the case against California and calling the request “unprecedented and illegal.” A third case against Georgia was dismissed by a federal judge for being filed in the wrong jurisdiction on January 23.

In its court filings, the administration claimed it could obtain these voter records because it needed to see whether states were complying with the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act around maintaining voter records. The administration also argued that the Civil Rights Act allowed it to obtain any voting records to determine whether a state was complying with federal laws protecting the right to vote.

In court, Justice Department lawyers have refused to give any reason why they need the voter record data or what they will do with it.

“At no time have they said that we have reason to believe that they are violating any federal law, including HAVA or NVRA, nor have they said that we are investigating a voting rights violation,” said Elisabeth Frost, an attorney with the Elias Law Group, which represents groups and individuals that have joined the election filing cases on the states’ side.

But statements from the department and its top officials make clear that the department will turn over the data to the Department of Homeland Security to analyze it for potential noncitizens or use it for other purposes related to immigration enforcement. This could result in 100,000 voters being removed from the rolls, Deputy Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said on Newsmax in December.

While this may eliminate the infinitely small number of noncitizens who have registered to vote, it will also purge a large number of American citizens who are legally registered. This has happened in state after state where elected officials try to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls, and it has already happened to citizens in states that are complying with Trump’s request for complete election record data.

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The administration could also undermine future elections by using this data to enable mass challenges to voter records, similar to what the election-denying group True The Vote does. did in Georgia in 2020.

“If they can accumulate this information, what they want to do with it is something like a DOGE database where they put it all in and what comes out of it is a bunch of different names of people who are going to say they shouldn’t vote,” Frost said.

This would be the administration’s most immediate use for state voter records, but it probably wouldn’t be the only one. The requests come as Trump has sought to wrest control of elections from the states through a series of executive orders that sought to unilaterally alter election laws. This is despite the fact that the Constitution places the power to regulate elections in the hands of the states and Congress, not the president.

“It’s just one more example of the all-out attack we’re seeing on states’ right to hold elections and, more broadly, on all the mechanisms that make democracy work,” said Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat. “This really amounts to a president and an administration that don’t want to have free and fair elections.”

And there are much more dangerous ways in which data from state election records could be used to undermine free and fair elections.

“You can’t take your eyes off what’s happening in Minneapolis and the news coming out of there,” Frost said. “ICE is using data from all kinds of sources to try to track people. State voter registration records contain a lot of information about Americans that is much, much more up-to-date than what the federal government has. It also contains a lot of information about how often people vote. It could be used to identify people who are more likely to vote for parties you wouldn’t want them to vote for.”

Bondi’s mafia offer to Minnesota – had it been accepted – could have been used to further accelerate the administration’s authoritarian retaliatory campaigns to enforce immigration law. This leaves election officials having to treat the federal government as a potential threat.

With the Trump administration apparently in a strategic retreat from the state, the immediate threat to Minnesota may be fading. But Simon said election officials must prepare for what was previously unthinkable.

“A lot of people are nervous about the November elections,” Simon said. “Our office is actively planning for scenarios that could involve direct or indirect interference with the federal government’s administration of the election.”