Washington — The Justice Department faced another setback on Thursday, marking the seventh and eighth defeats in its legal campaign to acquire sensitive voter data from over two dozen states. Federal judges dismissed lawsuits seeking access to voter rolls in both Maine and Wisconsin.
In the case concerning Maine, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker ruled against the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which aimed to compel state authorities to release the full voter registration list. This list included personal details such as birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and parts of Social Security numbers.
Walker became the seventh judge to oppose the Trump administration’s push for state voter rolls. Shortly after, U.S. District Judge James Peterson became the eighth, as he dismissed the Justice Department’s similar lawsuit against Wisconsin.
Efforts to procure voter registration data from other states, including Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and Rhode Island, have also ended in failure.
Walker, in his 22-page ruling, appointed during President Trump’s first term, asserted that the Justice Department lacks the authority to demand access to Maine’s voter rolls. He dismissed the administration’s argument that the Civil Rights Act, alongside the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, mandated the state to share its voter lists with the department.
Walker clarified that these voting laws “do not contemplate production of the unredacted computerized list to the Attorney General so that he might loom over the shoulder of the state election official to point out and demand the correction of inaccuracies in the list.”
The Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act require states to maintain computerized statewide voter registration lists that are accurate and current.
The judge also said that construing the Civil Rights Act “to implicitly provide the United States a right to every [statewide voter registration list] on demand for purposes of conducting a comprehensive, line-by-line audit of the state’s compliance with HAVA and the NVRA would take a sledgehammer to the balance Congress struck when it required states to create and maintain computerized lists of registered voters in the first place.”
The Justice Department first sought a copy of Maine and Wisconsin’s voter registration lists last year to ensure compliance with the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
But after officials from the two states refused to share unredacted versions of their voter rolls, the Trump administration sued, alleging violations of the two voting laws and a provision of the Civil Rights Act. The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states in all and the District of Columbia after state officials declined to turn over their voter rolls.
In dismissing the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Maine, Walker wrote that accepting the government’s interpretation of the civil rights law would require him to “turn a blind eye to traditional principles of federalism and how those principles have found expression in American elections — the backdrop against which Congress enacted the NVRA and HAVA.”
In the Wisconsin case, Peterson, appointed by former President Barack Obama, said that voter registration lists are not documents that must be produced under the Civil Rights Act.
The attempts to secure states’ voter rolls appear to be part of Mr. Trump’s plan to assert more federal control over elections. The president has repeatedly raised allegations of widespread fraud in U.S. elections, though without offering any evidence.
