By Zoe Tillman The US State Department is moving to give state and local officials, as well as potentially some nonprofit organizations, access to passport records to verify voters’ citizenship.

The plan, laid out in a notice recently sent to key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, would add “voter eligibility” to the official list of “routine uses” for the State Department’s passport services records and provide access beyond government entities. Historically, uses of the data have primarily involved domestic and international government agencies and officials.

The expansion would dovetail with a controversial campaign by the Trump administration to tap into federal records to pursue election fraud investigations and aid states reviewing their voter rolls. It could give more entities access to sensitive data, which is subject to US privacy laws.

The State Department’s notice, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News, doesn’t specify what nonprofit groups would be eligible to gain access. Based on bureaucratic timelines, the proposal wouldn’t take effect until after the Nov. 3 midterms, when Republicans are defending their slim majority in Congress.

Still, the changes could end up factoring in the administration’s broader push to play a bigger role in some aspects of elections. States, and not the federal government, are primarily in charge of running voting under the US Constitution.

Critics allege President Donald Trump is pressing baseless claims of widespread fraud and unlawfully asserting a larger federal role in elections. Trump and his allies have advocated for more aggressive federal efforts to root out out noncitizen voting and fraud. Studies in the past have shown that such incidents are relatively rare.

A number of conservative-leaning advocacy groups have backed the Trump administration’s “election integrity” policies and some have filed lawsuits accusing Democrat-led states of failing to clean up their voter rolls.

The Justice Department notified a judge about the State Department’s plan earlier in the week in a pending fight over Trump’s March executive order directing federal agencies to play a larger role in voter verification. The department didn’t include a copy or the full text of the proposed language in the public court filing.

The State Department said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. It had no immediate comment on its passport record proposal.

In addition to passport-related services, the other approved uses for these records in the past have included verifying citizenship and identity for “social security benefits, employment applications, estate settlements, and federal and state law enforcement and counterterrorism purposes,” according to the existing guidelines.

The Justice Department’s notice earlier this week came in a trio of lawsuits in Washington federal court contesting key sections of Trump’s executive order, which included instructions to create a list of eligible US citizen voters using information from “relevant federal databases” to provide to state election offices as guidance.

Democratic Party leaders and organizations and voting rights advocates that sued have accused Trump and administration officials of unlawfully overstepping in an effort to assert greater federal control over elections and, in the short term, to help Republicans keep their majorities in Congress. Lawyers for the challengers had no immediate comment about the passport records access issue.

Democratic Party leaders and organizations and voting rights advocates that sued have accused Trump and administration officials of unlawfully overstepping in an effort to assert greater federal control over elections and, in the short term, to help Republicans keep their majorities in Congress. Lawyers for the challengers had no immediate comment about the passport records access issue.

The judge had required the government to update the court on any “material factual developments” while the case is pending. Democracy Docket earlier reported the Justice Department’s notice.

According to the Justice Department, the State Department will formally publish the proposal in the Federal 30 days after it notified the congressional committees. After that, the public will get another 30 days to submit comments.

Another part of Trump’s contested order related to the US Postal Service became the focus of intense legal wrangling in recent weeks. Federal judges blocked the postal agency from quickly implementing new restrictions on how it handles mail-in ballots in time for the November midterms, and the Supreme Court rebuffed the Justice Department’s request to immediately intervene. Separately, the Justice Department recently asked the US Supreme Court to lift a block on its expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to include information from the Social Security Administration as well as immigration records, and to allow states to run bulk searches. A federal district judge found that plan violated US privacy laws and put Americans at risk of having their voter registrations wrongly canceled. The justices haven’t acted yet.

The case is DSCC v. Trump, 1:26-cv-01114, US District, District of Columbia (Washington).