Nine states handed over the Social Security numbers and driver's license data of 48 million registered voters to a nonprofit bankrolled by Mark Zuckerberg's election foundation — and used a "research exception" in federal law to contact the unregistered people they found in those files.
The Department of Justice wants to know who else saw that data.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward sent formal demand letters to two nonprofits at the center of the Zuckerberg-funded election operation: the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). The letters demand records of services provided to member states, research projects conducted, correspondence with state motor vehicle departments, and — critically — any sharing or disclosure of information from those departments to outside parties.
The concern isn't abstract. ERIC's contracts with member states require disclosure of private data belonging to individuals who are not registered to vote. That means the personal information of people who never opted into the system — their Social Security numbers, their license data — was flowing to a nonprofit network that had received $70 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ahead of the 2020 election.
That $70 million was just one piece. Zuckerberg's foundation dumped more than $400 million into CEIR and the Center for Tech & Civic Life during the 2020 cycle, distributed to 23 states and Washington, D.C. under something called the Voter Education Grant Program — ostensibly for "nonpartisan, accurate, and official voting information." The announcement came in October 2020 under Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg's names.
Woodward's letter makes the legal stakes plain. "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, referring to the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. He added that "using protected information for certain partisan purposes is not a government function."
That last line matters. The DPPA allows motor vehicle data to be shared for government purposes. The DOJ is now questioning whether what ERIC and CEIR did with voter data qualifies — or whether a Zuckerberg-funded voter outreach operation dressed itself up as a government function to access data it had no legal right to touch.
Email communications obtained through a public records request in Georgia showed CEIR was "coordinating ERIC eligible voter outreach" — contacting individuals identified in motor vehicle files who weren't registered to vote. The federal "research exception" that ERIC used to access this data explicitly requires that personal information not be "published, re-disclosed or used to contact individuals." The emails suggest that's exactly what happened.
The man at the center of both organizations is David Becker, who founded and organized both ERIC and CEIR. Before building the election data infrastructure that 27 states and the District of Columbia eventually joined, Becker was a government lawyer and a director at People for the American Way — the liberal advocacy group founded to counter the religious right. His voter-integrity nonprofits were, from the beginning, built by a man whose career was organized around progressive political goals.
Homeland Security officials believe at least nine states signed grant agreements with CEIR that authorized the transfer of motor vehicle data. Pennsylvania alone received a $13 million grant — and the terms required the state to turn over motor vehicle records so CEIR could build lists of eligible but unregistered voters.
The 2020 "Zuck Bucks" story was always framed as a funding scandal — a billionaire pouring cash into election offices in key swing states Democrats were targeting. The DOJ investigation adds a second layer that's arguably worse. It wasn't just about funding drop boxes and election operations. It was about building a pipeline of personal data — millions of Social Security numbers and license records — routed through nonprofits run by a progressive operative, under legal cover that may not hold up.
Four hundred million dollars bought a lot of access. The DOJ is now asking what else it bought.
