In 2020, Pennsylvania took a $13 million grant from a nonprofit called the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
The grant had a condition attached. Pennsylvania had to hand over the motor vehicle data it had already given to a separate group, the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC. CEIR would then use that data to build lists of Pennsylvanians who were eligible to vote but hadn't registered, and go find them.
Most of CEIR's money that year came from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes.
Six years later, the Justice Department wants the paperwork.
On September 30, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward sent letters to both ERIC and CEIR demanding records on how they handled voters' personal data. Pennsylvania wasn't the only state that signed on. An administration official says at least nine states signed grant agreements authorizing the transfer of motor vehicle data, and those nine states have more than 48 million registered voters between them.
That data is protected by the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that strictly limits what can be done with the personal information states collect when you get a driver's license or register a car. In practice it covers your name, your address, your driver's license number and, according to the Department of Homeland Security, your Social Security number.
Woodward's letter puts the DOJ's position in plain terms: "Using protected information for certain partisan purposes is not a government function and is thus not permitted under the DPPA."
He also made clear the DOJ isn't just asking what was handed to outsiders. "Even apart from the issue of disclosure to third parties, the scope of ERIC's own use of DPPA-protected personal information remains unclear," he wrote.
The DOJ wants ERIC's records on the services it provides member states, the research projects it runs, its correspondence with state motor vehicle departments, and every record relating to its "sharing or disclosure of information obtained by a state department of motor vehicles." CEIR, the group on the receiving end of that data, got a nearly identical letter.
ERIC's member list currently includes 27 states and the District of Columbia. It sells itself as a voter-roll cleanup service that catches duplicate registrations and people who have moved or died. But membership comes with a requirement most voters have never heard of. States have to contact people who are eligible to vote but haven't registered. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose referral started the DOJ inquiry, says ERIC "lobbies states to sign a contract that requires the disclosure of the private data of individuals who were not registered to vote."
Several Republican-led states have already left ERIC over exactly that.
Mullin also warned that ERIC "exposes millions of citizens' sensitive private data to unknown contractors, subcontractors and agents of ERIC." Emails from Georgia show CEIR "coordinating ERIC outreach," contacting individuals identified in the motor vehicle file.
ERIC and CEIR have a common founder. David Becker, a former government lawyer, founded and organized both. Before that, he was a director at People for the American Way, the left-wing advocacy group created to fight the religious right.
So one man built the group that collects the voter data and the group that received it. The second group was funded by the most powerful man in social media.
During the 2020 election cycle, Zuckerberg and Chan put more than $400 million into CEIR and the Center for Tech & Civic Life combined. That's the "Zuck Bucks" operation that put private money directly into government election offices. More than $70 million of it went to CEIR. CEIR in turn handed out voter education grants to 23 states and Washington, D.C. In October 2020, CEIR announced the news under the headline "Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Increase Support for Safe and Reliable Voting."
That same month, Facebook was throttling the Hunter Biden laptop story. Zuckerberg later admitted in a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan that the company shouldn't have demoted it.
In other words, while one of his companies was deciding what news voters could see, his money was paying the groups that were deciding which voters to contact.
The DOJ now has the letters out and the records demand on the table. Nine states, 48 million voters and $400 million are all part of the question. Nobody has yet explained where the data went.
