State lawmakers are subpoenaing information about Montana’s voter registry from Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen to determine what voter information her office has shared with the federal government. Members of the State Administration and Veterans Affairs Committee voted 10-1 on Wednesday to compel Jacobsen to produce details about voter information the state’s top elections official shared with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2025 when federal officials requested unredacted information about registered Montana voters. In emails to Secretary of State staff, Justice Department officials in July 2025 said they needed the information to “facilitate a review for noncitizens and dead voters.” The emails were brought to light by an MTFP records request that revealed the Justice Department’s demands and Jacobsen’s responses. SAVA lawmakers learned of the communications through that reporting. President Donald Trump has insisted repeatedly and without evidence that noncitizen voters caused his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Justice Department officials have attempted to obtain unredacted voter data from 48 states during the past year.  Details about what voter information Montana has shared have not been forthcoming, despite repeated requests, said Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, who has been asking since January for Jacobsen to appear before the committee.  “I think, at this point, we’ve been seven or eight months into this process,” Kortum said before the vote. “I’m worried that should this evasion succeed, that it will kind of draw into question our job here as the oversight committee.” Legislators are trying to determine what information the secretary of state produced to satisfy repeated U.S. Department of Justice demands for sensitive voter information.  Multiple states that have refused to comply with those requests have been sued. The Justice Department has lost the first 23 lawsuits to receive rulings in federal district courts. State defenses have centered on voter privacy and federal encroachment into states’ constitutional rights to administer elections. Montana has not been sued regarding compliance with the request.  Federal officials specifically requested Montana’s full voter file, including voters’ driver’s license numbers, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and birth dates.  Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, the committee chair, told lawmakers before the vote that Jacobsen spared Montana from a lawsuit by giving the U.S. Department of Justice most of what it wanted.  “The Department of Justice made it very clear that under the Help America Vote Act, they were to include registrants’ full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license numbers and the last four of the registrant’s Social Security number,” Manzella told the committee. Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen. Credit: Courtesy / Christi Jacobsen campaign “Now, our secretary of state, standing on the state’s rights, has expressed to us that they didn’t include the driver’s license numbers because they feel that the state has ownership of those. They did include the last four digits of the Social Security number for the obvious reason that Social Security numbers are issued by the federal government.” U.S. District Court judges have concluded in the 23 lawsuits that the Justice Department has lost that the Help America Vote Act doesn’t require states to disclose fully unredacted voter registration databases to the federal government. HAVA contains no enforcement language granting the DOJ access to unredacted state voter databases, nor does the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which has also been cited by DOJ attorneys. “Basically, they are saying that they want this information to investigate whether states are complying with HAVA and the NVRA, and there’s just no provision in HAVA that allows them to get records for investigative purposes,” said Sejal Jhaveri, senior legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit advocate for democratic elections. MTFP contacted Jhaveri for insights into the Justice Department’s pursuit of state voter registration data and the federal government’s use of sensitive voter information produced by states that complied with the federal demand for records. At the root of the federal government’s strategy is the SAVE program, operated by the Department of Homeland Security. The acronym stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a database used to determine whether documented immigrants qualify for entitlements like food subsidies. SAVE has also been used for several years to cross-reference documented immigrants with voter registrations. A documented immigrant on SAVE isn’t a citizen, and is not authorized to vote.  SAVE is known for misidentifying citizens as noncitizens, which has resulted in citizens being wrongfully removed from voter lists. The Campaign Legal Center is currently suing the state of Texas for allegedly using the SAVE database to remove Americans from voter rolls, Jhaveri said. Texas is one of the few states that gave the Department of Justice its unredacted voter registration file as requested.  Montana Secretary of State Jacobsen entered an agreement in November 2025 to begin using SAVE, and followed that decision by mailing 467,000 promotional postcards touting the agreement to Montanans. The cards, which featured an image of Jacobsen and Trump, cost $196,000, and were paid for with a federal grant. The Montana SAVE search identified 23 potential noncitizen voters, according to Jacobsen. Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen sent a mass postcard featuring herself and Donald Trump as part of Montana Republicans’ effort to root out illegal voting. Pictured on Jan. 14, 2026. Credit: Lauren Miller, Montana Free Press, CatchLight Local/Report for America In the 2025 Legislature, Manzella succeeded in having a black eagle added to Montana driver’s licenses as proof of citizenship, and also sought an amendment to the Montana Constitution. The state Constitution says that “any citizen of the United States 18 years of age or older who meets the registration and residence requirements provided by law is a qualified elector” unless imprisoned or, by court determination, of unsound mind. Manzella wanted to change “any citizen” to “only citizens.” The bill was defeated. By uploading unredacted voter files into the SAVE database, the federal government added two powerful identifiers: driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Paired with a name or address, the last four digits of a Social Security number greatly reduce false positives. There are countless John Does, for example, but only one associated with the last four digits of a specific Social Security number. In June, a federal judge ruled that running entire state voter rolls through the SAVE system, as Montana and other states had done, is unlawful and had resulted in U.S. citizens being purged from registered voter files. The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters against the Department of Homeland Security. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her June 22 order, which blocked use of the system as it had been applied by Montana and other states. The last four digits of a Social Security number are legally protected personal information and can do a lot of damage in the hands of identity thieves. As the Brennan Center for Justice told MTFP earlier this year, transfer of that information from states to the federal Department of Justice, which intended to share it with the Department of Homeland Security and, according to records acquired by MTFP, private contractors, created a cybersecurity risk. The other concern about feeding state voter registration files into SAVE was that the federal government might be creating a national voter database. “Certainly, the evidence points that way, given that these requests are not limited to just one or two states where they thought there might be violations,” Jhaveri said. “The requests went to 48 states. They sued 30 plus the District of Columbia.” Earlier this year, President Trump issued an executive order asking for the creation of a citizenship list, which reflects the work being conducted around SAVE, she said. In December 2025, the federal Department of Justice also submitted to states a memorandum of understanding empowering the department to dictate changes to state voter rolls. Most secretaries of state, including Jacobsen, declined to sign it.   The post Legislators subpoena secretary of state over voter data handoff appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less