Kilian Kagle, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division’s chief FOIA officer and senior privacy official, quietly resigned as the department presses forward with collecting state voter registration records and plans to share them with the Department of Homeland Security.
For nearly a year the Civil Rights Division has demanded broad voter roll data from most states, seeking sensitive fields such as driver license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses. In at least some requests, including in California, the department also sought party affiliation and voting history. DOJ says the data are needed to verify that states are maintaining voter rolls correctly and removing ineligible registrants, and it has sued more than two dozen states that declined to provide records.
Acting head of the Justice Department voting section Eric Neff told a Rhode Island hearing the department intends to run state records through DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to screen for noncitizens and deceased registrants, and that it plans to share records with DHS. Neff later told the court the data would not be used for immigration enforcement by DOJ, but he acknowledged the Civil Rights Division could not promise how other agencies will use the information. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has said SAVE referrals that flag potential noncitizens are forwarded to Homeland Security Investigations for follow up.
Seventeen states, mostly led by Republican officials, have already turned over voter rolls, according to DOJ. But the agency has not published the public notices or privacy impact assessments that federal privacy laws typically require when establishing a new federal data collection or a new dissemination for a different purpose. Former Civil Rights Division official Justin Levitt said DOJ’s possession of the state records without public notice or transparency about use and storage violates the Privacy Act and raises security concerns, calling the collection of each of the 17 state rolls unlawful. John Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center criticized DOJ for having no legal authority to maintain a large federal database of state voter records and for failing to produce required privacy documentation.
Federal judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have so far rejected DOJ demands in lawsuits, concluding the federal government is not entitled to those records. U.S. District Judge David Carter ruled in January that DOJ’s demand in the California case violated federal privacy statutes and California law. The rulings reflect the long-standing principle that states administer their own elections and historically have maintained voter data.
Neff told the Rhode Island court that DOJ has not yet used data from the 17 states because there are additional steps needed before the department can represent full compliance with the Privacy Act, and that acting Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer Peter Winn was working on a plan. Kagle confirmed his resignation to reporters but declined further comment; he had recently completed a privacy impact assessment in an unrelated DOJ case-management matter on March 20.
The push to aggregate voter information for cross-agency screening comes amid continued scrutiny by the Trump administration of the 2020 election and repeated, unproven assertions of widespread voter fraud. This week the president issued an executive order aimed at limiting mail-in voting that tasks DHS with compiling lists of eligible voters in each state, an order many legal experts expect will face litigation.
Kagle’s departure is part of a broader wave of career departures and privacy-focused resignations tied to data-sharing controversies across federal agencies. Other notable exits include Melanie Krause, acting IRS commissioner, who resigned after the agency entered a data-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that courts later blocked; and Charles Borges, former chief data officer of the Social Security Administration’s data office, who resigned and became a whistleblower over data practices. Since Borges left, SSA said two former data office staffers were referred to a watchdog for possible Hatch Act violations after communications with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security numbers with voter rolls, and the agency inspector general is reviewing an anonymous complaint alleging potential misuse of Social Security data by a former employee.
Privacy experts and civil rights advocates say DOJ’s collection and potential cross-agency dissemination of detailed voter records without publicly available privacy assessments or clear legal authority raises substantial legal, civil rights and security concerns. Those concerns have produced multiple legal challenges and contributed to internal resignations at DOJ and other agencies.