The Trump administration keeps suing. States keep winning. The Justice Department has now filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia, each one demanding the same thing: complete, unredacted voter registration files, down to birthdates, home addresses, partial Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. Federal judges have not been impressed. Twenty-three of those cases have already collapsed, dismissed by judges appointed by presidents from both parties.
The legal push, run out of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, started last year and has only picked up speed as the 2026 midterms draw closer. Officials argue they need the data to enforce two federal statutes, the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, both meant to keep voter rolls accurate and up to date. States see something else going on. Election officials in more than two dozen jurisdictions, most of them Democratic-led but a handful Republican-led too, have refused to hand over full files, arguing the requests reach well beyond what federal law allows.
More than a dozen states agreed to cooperate, some handing over full records and others offering only the publicly available versions of their rolls. The rest ended up in court. So far, that's gone badly for the administration. Judges appointed by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush have thrown out the DOJ's claims, and one federal appeals court has already weighed in against the government — a first for this fight, and a sign the dispute may eventually land at the Supreme Court.
"Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve.
— Attorney General Pam Bondi
The losing streak has been remarkably consistent. Courts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Wisconsin, Maine, Arizona, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, Michigan and Illinois have all rejected the DOJ's demands for unredacted rolls, and Colorado joined that list this month when a Bush-appointed judge dismissed the case with prejudice — meaning the department can't simply refile it.
In the Colorado ruling, the judge rejected the administration's central legal theory: that a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives the attorney general sweeping authority to demand these records. Several other judges have reached the identical conclusion, essentially telling the department the same thing in different words — the statute doesn't stretch that far.
One judge went further. In dismissing the government's case against California, the court noted that DOJ's stated justification for the data request — routine voter roll maintenance — didn't match statements made elsewhere by department officials, and warned that the broader campaign risked concentrating sensitive information about millions of Americans inside the executive branch without congressional sign-off.
Where the Cases Stand Now
Not every case has ended the same way. A judge dismissed the department's initial case against Georgia purely on procedural grounds — wrong court — and government lawyers have since refiled it there. The DOJ voluntarily dropped its case against Oklahoma after the state agreed to turn over its voter list. Seven cases remain actively pending: Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Utah, Vermont and Washington.
The most consequential defeat came from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a lower court's decision blocking the department from obtaining Michigan's unredacted voter file. It's the first time an appellate court has weighed in, and it gives the administration's losing streak real legal weight beyond the district court level — the kind of precedent that could shape how the remaining cases, and any future appeals, play out.
What the Government Is Actually Asking For
The requests at the center of these lawsuits aren't for the public voter files that campaigns and researchers routinely use. They're for the full, unredacted underlying records — the kind of data states normally keep locked down even from other government agencies.
Data the DOJ Has Requested
Court filings and DOJ correspondence to the states describe a request for:
✓ Full birthdates and home addresses of registered voters
✓ Partial Social Security numbers
✓ Driver's license numbers
Voting rights organizations, including Common Cause, the Campaign Legal Center and the ACLU, have filed a separate suit in Washington, D.C., arguing the department is effectively building a national voter database that no federal statute authorizes — and asking a judge to order any data already collected to be deleted.
What Happens Next
The Justice Department has appealed most of its district court losses, which means the fight is far from settled. With the 2026 midterms approaching and the Michigan case already pushing into appellate territory, election lawyers on both sides expect the dispute to keep climbing — possibly all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department has already obtained data from a number of states that agreed to cooperate voluntarily, even as it continues litigating against those that haven't. Meanwhile, a related fight is unfolding over the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE database, which the administration revamped to let states cross-check voter rolls against citizenship records — and which has produced numbers election officials in several states say don't add up.
DOJ's sprawling data collection effort risks centralizing sensitive voter information inside the executive branch without approval from Congress or from voters themselves.— Brennan Center for Justice analysis
For now, the practical effect of two dozen-plus rulings is limited but real: most states that refused to comply are still refusing, and courts keep backing them up. Whether that holds depends on how appellate courts, and possibly the Supreme Court, ultimately read a 65-year-old civil rights statute the Trump administration is trying to stretch into a nationwide data-collection tool.
