Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is joining Democratic officials from 11 other states in opposing the Trump administration’s proposed expansion of a federal immigration status database to help determine voter eligibility.

“Americans should be proud of our free, safe and secure elections administered by the states under the Constitution,” Bellows said in a written statement. “These proposed changes would do nothing to safeguard election integrity, but by creating a vast federal database of millions of American voters would in fact threaten the privacy and security of voter information nationwide.”  

The dozen secretaries of state wrote a lengthy letter Monday to Roman Jankowski, chief privacy officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in response to the proposed changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, or SAVE.

The online program allows federal, state and local government agencies to verify the immigration and citizenship status of people applying for benefits or licenses. In a notice published in late October, DHS said it was making updates to “expand search functionality for registered SAVE user agencies to verify U.S. citizenship… and to clarify use of SAVE for voter verification.”

The department did not immediately respond to an inquiry Tuesday seeking further details on the reason for the change and reaction to the feedback from the secretaries of state.

Bellows and the other secretaries of state are arguing that the changes are likely to introduce unnecessary privacy and security issues into sensitive voter information data. They said the changes would encroach on states’ authority to regulate elections and that states have not typically provided personal information about voters to other agencies in the past.

“Unauthorized access is a significant and concrete risk given recent breaches and other incidents jeopardizing DHS data,” they wrote.

The proposal comes as Maine is being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for refusing to provide federal authorities with voter registrations lists, the release of which Bellows, a Democrat running for governor, has said would violate federal privacy laws.

The Justice Department cited concerns about duplicate voter registrations in requesting the information, which also comes amid broader Trump administration efforts to combat alleged noncitizen voting.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security settled a federal lawsuit that four Republican states — Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio — had brought against the Biden administration alleging federal authorities were not doing enough to help states verify voter eligibility.

Those states have agreed to help the administration with improving SAVE and have said they may hand over state driver’s license records for use in developing the system.