Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks about an MS-13 gang leader who was arrested in an operation by the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force, during a news conference at the Manassas FBI Field Office, Thursday, March 27, 2025, in Manassas, Va. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
The U.S. Department of Justice has initiated legal action against six states, aiming to compel them to provide extensive voter information, marking another step by the Trump administration toward obtaining electoral data.
The states targeted by these lawsuits are Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The DOJ is seeking statewide voter registration lists, which include voters’ full names, addresses, and either driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
Attorney General Pam Bondi emphasized the importance of maintaining up-to-date voter rolls, stating, “Accurate voter rolls are the cornerstone of fair and free elections, and too many states have fallen into a pattern of noncompliance with basic voter roll maintenance.” She added that the DOJ would continue to pursue litigation to ensure adherence to fundamental election safeguards.
The pursuit of “election integrity” has been a consistent theme for President Donald Trump and his supporters since his initial tenure. In March, the administration attempted to mandate that voters provide proof of citizenship when registering federally, a move that was later blocked by a federal judge.
Earlier, in September, the administration filed lawsuits against Maine and Oregon to obtain their voter registration lists. Efforts to access voter data have also extended to states like California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.
However, many privacy advocates and state officials view these requests and subsequent lawsuits as excessive and potentially contradictory to the administration’s stated goals of safeguarding electoral integrity.
“Trump’s DOJ is using its immense federal power to try to intimidate us into turning over protected voter data and changing our voting processes to fit President Trump’s whims,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows blasted in a September statement responding to her state being sued. “We’re not backing down because we know our hardworking state and local election officials run excellent elections here.”
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read called the lawsuits an attempt by Trump “to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections.” The Democratic National Committee (DNC) added in an Oregon amicus brief that the lawsuit was a backdoor effort to build a “national voter file.”
The Trump administration has contended that the DOJ is charged with enforcing the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). “The Attorney General also has the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) at her disposal to demand the production, inspection, and analysis of the statewide voter registration lists,” the department said in its recent announcement.
The DOJ further holds that the CRA “imposes a ‘sweeping’ obligation on election officials to ‘retain and preserve all records and papers which come into their possession’” relating to voting, and that the courts do not have much sway in examining the DOJ’s reasoning.
“Our federal elections laws ensure every American citizen may vote freely and fairly,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results. At this Department of Justice, we will not stand for this open defiance of federal civil rights laws.”
As Democracy Docket reports, the lawsuits against the previous eight states have stalled, with no court ordering the states to release the voter information to the Trump administration.
