President Donald Trump listens during a White House event announcing the Freedom Haulers initiative on Thursday, July 30, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
The Trump administration suffered another courtroom setback this week in its ongoing push to obtain states’ “unredacted” voter rolls.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Anne R. Traum, an appointee of President Joe Biden, ruled against the U.S. Department of Justice in Nevada. The decision marked the 22nd time a federal court has rejected the DOJ’s position in the heavily litigated voter roll dispute.
With the Nevada ruling, every court that has weighed the issue has sided with the states, extending an unbroken string of legal losses for the Trump administration over access to voter registration records.
The Justice Department sued Nevada and Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar in December 2025, claiming the state violated the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Federal officials also asked the court to compel Nevada to turn over the requested documents.
Nevada responded in January 2026 with a motion to dismiss. As the case moved forward, outside parties including the ACLU of Nevada and a voter who said their “personal, private data is at risk” filed motions to intervene, which were accepted by the court and the parties.
After reviewing the broader legal record, Traum ruled in Nevada’s favor.
“Joining every other court to have addressed the issue so far, the Court now grants the motions to dismiss and denies the motion to compel,” the judge wrote in a 12-page order.
Traum started out by recounting how the litigation came to be.
“Since 2025, DOJ has sent demands to at least forty states seeking their full voter files,” the order reads. “DOJ made its first demand on Secretary Aguilar in a letter dated June 25, 2025. The letter requested ‘Nevada’s current statewide voter registration list’ along with fourteen other types of election-related information.”
The initial letter cited the state’s HAVA obligations, the judge notes. In turn, Aguilar “provided DOJ with a link to the publicly available Statewide Voter Registration List (the SVRL),” the order goes on.
But the government was not satisfied.
“DOJ said that the state ‘must’ disclose a voter list that ‘contain[s] all fields, including the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number,'” the order continues — explaining that this time the government cited the NVRA and the CRA as additional authorities.
The second demand was rejected and the lawsuit ensued.
The court begins with a rejection of CRA process arguments.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, “no motion except its own Motion to Compel is justiciable in this proceeding” and “it is entitled under the CRA to a summary proceeding where the Court must order the Secretary to produce records upon the Government’s bare showing that it made a demand on Secretary Aguilar which he refused.”
The order further outlines the DOJ’s argument:
The Government argues that the CRA’s purpose is to facilitate pre-lawsuit investigation, and to that end, the statute provides for a proceeding where the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not apply, and no pleadings, no discovery, and no motions to dismiss “may be used to question or examine ‘the reasons why the Attorney General considers the records essential…'”
Traum said the law simply was not on the government’s side here.
“The Government cites no binding authority for its position that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (including the motion to dismiss standard) are inapplicable,” the order goes on. “Neither the text of the statute nor the weight of precedent support the Government’s position.”
In other words, the DOJ insisted that neither Nevada nor any of the accepted intervening defendants could filed motions to dismiss. The court said the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — and the relevant case law interpreting the rules in the context — say otherwise.
“A court may dismiss a complaint for ‘failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted,'” the order continues. “[A] district court must accept as true all well-pleaded factual allegations in the complaint and determine whether those factual allegations state a plausible claim for relief.”
After deciding the defendants do have the power to try and have the lawsuit dismissed, the court rejected CRA merits arguments.
“The CRA does not cover SVRL because it does not cover records created by government officials,” the judge found.
Again joining every other court to rule on the issue, Traum explained that the CRA’s document retention demand applies to documents “come into [a state officer of election’s] possession.”
The SVRL file “is compiled and updated by state officials,” the judge notes, so it necessarily “does not come into” the state’s possession.
The court employs a metaphor from precedent to hammer the point home: “It would be rather strange to say that the baker has ‘come into’ possession of the cakes after pulling them out of the oven.”
Also on Friday, the DOJ lost an appeal of a Michigan-focused lawsuit before the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
The post ‘Joining every other court’: Trump admin’s losing streak continues in lawsuits seeking ‘unredacted’ voter data with latest loss in Nevada first appeared on Law & Crime.
