The DOJ's Own Court Filing on the Voter Data Deal

Introduction

The Department of Justice admitted in a federal court filing that a DOGE employee, in his official capacity as a Social Security Administration staffer, signed a contract to use SSA records to challenge American election results. The group's stated aim, in the government's own words: "to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." The contract was executed on March 24, 2025, and SSA's own leadership didn't learn it existed until November.

That quote comes from the DOJ's own Notice of Corrections to the Record, filed January 16, 2026 in AFSCME v. SSA (Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH). A federal employee used his government access to sign a partisan voter-fraud operation, and the government's own lawyers put it in writing for a federal judge nine months later. That is the whole story in one sentence, and it hasn't led a single major morning paper.

What the Filing Actually Says

The seven-page filing was signed by Elizabeth Shapiro, Deputy Branch Director of the DOJ's Civil Division Federal Programs Branch. It is titled a "correction" because earlier filings in this case said something else, but reading it, the word that fits better is confession.

From page five, verbatim: "SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA's DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group's stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a 'Voter Data Agreement,' in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025."

The same page tells you when SSA leadership found out: "SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025." That's eight months after the signing before the agency that owned the data knew the contract existed. The agreement was never reviewed through SSA's data exchange procedures, which is why nobody at the agency caught it for that long. In late December 2025, SSA made two Hatch Act referrals to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel related to the activities described in that section of the filing.

The political advocacy group is not named in court documents. I'm not naming it here either, because the DOJ filing doesn't, and several outlets that initially speculated were asked to clarify they had not. FOIA-produced documents released by SSA in late April 2026 contain agreement language taken from Arizona regulations and bear a "striking similarity" to a Maricopa County GOP voter data agreement, which suggests an Arizona-based organization. That's where the public record stops.

The Encrypted File SSA Still Can't Open

Page two of the same filing has a second incident that almost no one has covered. On March 3, 2025, a different DOGE team member at SSA sent DHS an encrypted, password-protected email attachment. Copied on that email were Steve Davis, then a senior DOGE adviser and Elon Musk's operational right hand, plus a DOGE-affiliated employee at the Department of Labor.

SSA "believes the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people." That's what the filing says. SSA's Chief Information Office has tried, and as of the January 16 filing still cannot open the file. The agency does not know whether Davis or the DOL employee received the password. SSA "has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared." The filing also acknowledges that DOGE members at SSA shared data through Cloudflare, an unapproved third-party server, from March 7 through March 17, roughly the ten days before the court entered its temporary restraining order. SSA cannot determine what data went onto Cloudflare or whether it is still there.

Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member on House Oversight, summarized the legal exposure on the encrypted file alone in a March 9, 2026 letter to the SSA Inspector General: "The Privacy Act prohibits interagency sharing of sensitive data without a system of records notice in place, and it appears no such notice was filed, potentially indicating 1,000 violations of the Privacy Act." So that's a thousand potential federal violations in one email, with Musk's senior adviser cc'd, and the agency that owns the data still can't read the attachment.

Who Benefits

The political advocacy group. They get federal legitimacy and database matching power they could not legally acquire any other way. The Numident, SSA's master identity database, contains 548 million-plus Social Security numbers, holding names, addresses, wage histories, and identifying data on effectively everyone alive in the United States, plus the dead. A privately assembled voter roll cross-checked against that database produces "matches" that look authoritative whether or not the underlying methodology is sound. The agreement language locks the data to "ONLY for purposes relating to a political or political party activity, a political campaign or an election," which spells out the partisan use case in the contract itself.

DOGE leadership and Elon Musk's inner orbit benefit next. Antonio Gracias, CIO of Valor Equity Partners, Elon Musk ally, and DOGE-SSA operative, went on stage at a March 30, 2025 Wisconsin rally with Musk and claimed he had cross-referenced SSA data with voter rolls and found noncitizens who voted. That was three days before a contested state Supreme Court election. He referred 57 cases for prosecution, which, in his own words, "may or may not have voted." Aram Moghaddassi, a DOGE engineer who was later made SSA co-CIO, separately contacted Florida Gov. DeSantis's deputy chief of staff on March 15, 2025 from a DHS email address asking for Florida voter registration and voting data "to check for voter fraud." The Voter Data Agreement is the paperwork that holds this pattern together, and the payoff is a manufactured fraud narrative that justifies state-level voter roll challenges and federal subpoenas.

And the Trump administration's DOJ benefits last. As NPR reported, the administration has sued 25 mostly Democratic-run states for refusing to turn over nonpublic voter rolls. The day after the Voter Data Agreement was transmitted, on March 25, 2025, an executive order instructed DHS and DOGE to "review each State's publicly available voter registration list" and ordered SSA to make its databases accessible to election officials. That timing matters: the signed agreement precedes the executive order by a day, which gives DOJ a federal pretext for demanding voter rolls from states that otherwise won't hand them over.

What the Court Did Next

The case has moved sharply since the January filing. On March 6, 2026, the SSA Office of Inspector General opened a formal investigation and notified four congressional committees. The trigger was an anonymous whistleblower complaint about a different allegation (a former DOGE engineer who allegedly told co-workers he had taken two sensitive databases out of SSA on a thumb drive), but the resulting probe is wide enough to cover the Voter Data Agreement, the Cloudflare exfiltration, and the encrypted DHS file. Sen. Ron Wyden told the AP the underlying allegations may amount to "one of the largest known data breaches in American history."

On April 10, 2026, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the preliminary injunction that had been blocking DOGE's access to SSA data. That was a substantive loss for the plaintiffs and let DOGE back into the records. The appeals panel still wrote that "the government's recent acknowledgments are alarming and raise serious questions about its earlier conduct before the district court," and remanded the case for further proceedings. Four days later, on April 14, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander granted full discovery. For the first time in this litigation, plaintiffs can compel internal records and testimony under oath.

Then came the FOIA production. Democracy Forward filed two FOIA requests in late January, then sued SSA on March 23, 2026 when the agency went silent. In late April, SSA produced 61 pages of heavily redacted records, including the actual Voter Data Transfer Agreement, the Hatch Act complaints in redacted form, and a stream of emails showing "frequent communications" between SSA DOGE personnel and the unnamed political group from March through May 2025. One email had an attachment titled "Election Fraud Examples that Affected Outcomes of Elections (1).docx." A separate FOIA-produced email shows an SSA sender transmitted a file with data on 971 SSA beneficiaries to HSI/ICE, copying Steve Davis.

The Hatch Act complaints, in their disclosed text, charge the employee with "using one's official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election" and "engaging in political activity while on duty." SSA's lawyers lifted that language directly from 5 U.S.C. § 7323 into a charging document against the agency's own employee.

The Bottom Line

Every American who has ever been issued a Social Security number sits inside the database DOGE accessed: SSN, wage history, home address, disability records. In March 2025, that database became the target of a signed contract whose stated purpose was to investigate whether the people inside it should be allowed to vote. The agreement was signed by a federal employee while he was on the clock as a federal employee, and the agency that owned the records was not told for eight months. The DOJ has now disclosed it to a court under oath, and a federal judge has granted discovery to find out what actually moved.

The whole filing is seven pages: the verbatim quote about overturning election results sits on page five, and the 1,000 people whose data is locked in an encrypted file SSA cannot open shows up on page two. The open question is whether discovery will compel DOGE to produce the rest of the Voter Data Agreement, the Cloudflare logs, the depositions of Davis and Gracias, and the password to the file SSA has been unable to open for fourteen months, or whether DOGE's documented use of Signal for internal communications will mean the full record never surfaces.