The Trump Administration Comes for State Voter Rolls
Since last May, the Department of Justice has been trying to acquire the voter rolls of every state and the District of Columbia. Forty-eight states have received requests—all but North Dakota (which does not require voter registration) and North Carolina (whose voter registration list the department obtained access to via separate litigation). The Justice Department has sued 29 of those states and D.C. when they refused to hand over the records. The department claims it needs and is entitled to the data to ensure that states are properly maintaining their rolls. Courts, so far, aren’t buying it. And there really isn’t much precedent for this.
So why is the Trump administration doing this?
The Justice Department’s effort to obtain state voter rolls is part of Trump’s never-ending pursuit of control over elections. The president has claimed, falsely, that states are “merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and that “[t]hey must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” A March 2025 executive order attempting to aggrandize presidential control over various election matters has been largely blocked by courts; he is rumored to be considering another one that is just as unconstitutional.
This demand is actually a retread—a callback to Trump’s first term. The sorest of winners, Trump obsessed over Hillary Clinton outpacing him in the popular vote, which he insisted would have been reversed “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He set up a voter fraud commission that disbanded after just two meetings. One of the commission’s ill-fated initiatives was an attempt to obtain state voter rolls. This was so poorly received that the secretary of state of Mississippi, a Republican, told the commission it could “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Yet it is not clear how this project actually would help the administration expand its control over elections—all the more reason to examine the effort more closely.
What Are Voter Rolls, and What Does Federal Law Actually Require?
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires every state that registers voters to maintain a “single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list.” Before HAVA, states were not required to keep such lists; in many states the lists were maintained at the local level. HAVA also requires that every state collect, as part of its voter registration efforts for federal office, the applicant’s driver’s license number or, if the applicant doesn’t have a license, the last four digits of their Social Security number.
An earlier act, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” (Six states—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—are exempt from the NVRA; all states are subject to HAVA.) HAVA, in turn, requires that each state election system “include provisions to ensure that voter registration records in the State are accurate and are updated regularly, including ... [a] system of file maintenance that makes a reasonable effort to remove registrants who are ineligible to vote from the official list of eligible voters.” Under such a system, “registrants who have not responded to a notice and who have not voted in 2 consecutive general elections for Federal office shall be removed from the official list of eligible voters.”
Generally speaking, this “maintenance” involves scouring registration rolls for three categories of people who are not eligible to vote: noncitizens, registrants who have moved outside of the state, and registrants who have died. But there are restrictions on states’ ability to prune their lists.
While states are not required to send out notices to potentially ineligible voters, every state does. This is because sending out notices—and then removing those who neither respond nor subsequently vote—is regarded as a “safe harbor” for compliance, according to Justin Levitt, a former voting rights lawyer at the Department of Justice who is now a professor at Loyola Law School. (Importantly, however, the NVRA provides that this notice-and-waiting-period is the only lawful way in which a state may remove someone from the voter rolls unless the registrant confirms in writing that they have moved.)
The NVRA also includes a “quiet period” of 90 days preceding a federal election (primary or general) that severely limits registration removals. Specifically, the NVRA provides that states “shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” In this context, “systematically” refers to the use of programs such as matching lists from different sources, general mailings, and door-to-door canvasses, as opposed to individualized information that is brought to the attention of election officials. The reason for this temporal restriction is that erroneous removals are much harder to fix so close to the election.
Why Is This Happening?
In letters to states and in court filings, the Department of Justice claims that it needs this information to determine whether the states are complying with voter list maintenance obligations under the NVRA and HAVA. But that doesn’t make sense, because the federal government’s role in all of this is quite limited. While the NVRA and HAVA both authorize the attorney general to sue to enforce the acts’ provisions (and the NVRA also allows private parties to sue), both statutes require only that states make a “reasonable effort” to remove ineligible voters. This is a relatively low bar. In rejecting a challenge to Michigan’s list maintenance brought by a conservative public-interest organization, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit defined “reasonable effort” as “a serious attempt that is rational and sensible; the attempt need not be perfect, or even optimal, so long as it remains within the bounds of rationality.” (As noted above, there is only one specific requirement: If a state sends notices, it must then remove those who do not respond and then do not vote in two consecutive federal general elections.) Thus, a good-faith interest in pursuing litigation cannot explain demanding every single state’s list rather than focusing on places where the Department of Justice believes states are not engaging in reasonable efforts at list maintenance.
So why is this happening? As a group of states noted in an amicus brief filed in the Michigan case, the voter roll demands fit a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s efforts to hoover up all sorts of data, ranging from an executive order directing agencies “to ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding” to efforts to obtain from states a vast array of data on participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—an effort subsequently blocked by a district court. The administration has also been eager to share data across programs, as in its efforts to use IRS data for immigration enforcement purposes. And information sharing increases the risk of information leakage and outright theft. The Social Security Administration’s inspector general is investigating allegations that a former Department of Government Efficiency employee told colleagues that he had access to, and intended to take to a future employer, databases that contain records for over 500 million Americans, living and dead, including Social Security numbers, birthdates, and parents’ names.
The Department of Justice might also intend to share the data it receives with the Department of Homeland Security, which recently retooled a U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) to help states to verify the citizenship of persons registered to vote. The Trump administration has offered SAVE to states for their use but has no direct way to compel them to use it; according to a recent report, 27 states are using it in some fashion, while others are concerned about its accuracy and privacy implications. The Department of Homeland Security has sent conflicting messages on the role it intends to play, while the Department of Justice has not addressed the issue.
Levitt believes that, at the end of the day, the department is demanding voter registration lists just because it’s something to do. He notes that Maureen Riordan, the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s voting section from early 2025 until January 2026, came from the private organization that filed the above-mentioned, unsuccessful list-maintenance suit under the NVRA. Levitt suggests Riordan might hakve hatched the plan simply as a way to “look busy.” Indeed, the president’s March 2025 executive order on elections directed the attorney general to “take appropriate action with respect to States that fail to comply with the list maintenance requirements” of the NVRA and HAVA. Perhaps the department is trying to get all the lists just to show that it’s going full throttle?
But there might be another reason as to why the government is so intent on pursuing this data. The department’s demands fit neatly into the administration’s broader effort to cast doubt on elections. Levitt expects that, if the Department of Justice actually prevails in litigation and obtains voter lists from recalcitrant states, it will “wave it around” and use it for rhetorical purposes without actually divulging much about the contents. And if the administration fails in litigation? Perhaps even better. The department’s briefs hint darkly that, without the ability to review states’ voter lists, there will be no way to ensure the integrity of the upcoming elections. What better way to explain an electoral defeat?
The States’ Response: Largely—but Not Entirely—Along Party Lines
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, so far 12 of the 48 states that received requests have turned over the data or pledged to do so. (Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon said on March 10 that the number is 16.) All 12 compliant states are “red states”—all voted for Trump in his three presidential bids and all have Republican governors. (One is Mississippi, which changed its tune from last time and did not tell the Department of Justice to jump in the Gulf of America.)
States that have refused to provide voter rolls have given three main sets of reasons: concerns that to do so would violate state law, concerns regarding what the federal government intends to do with the information, and concerns that sensitive voter information—such as the voter’s birthdate, driver’s license number, and partial Social Security number—will inadvertently be exposed.
The Department of Justice did not take no for an answer. It has sued, in waves, 29 states plus the District of Columbia—likely the first time that the federal government has launched litigation against a majority of states. This includes every single state that Trump ever lost in an election, but also conservative redoubts such as West Virginia, Utah, and Kentucky. The department held off on suing those states until late last month, likely hoping that these states would voluntarily accede to the request. Idaho recently announced that it would not comply, suggesting that another suit may be coming soon. (One defendant state, Oklahoma, agreed just days ago to turn over the requested data, four weeks after the department sued it.)
In an effort to win states over, the department has proposed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) regarding list transmission. The MOU provides that the department will review submitted lists and notify each state of “any voter list maintenance issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, the Justice Department found when testing, assessing, and analyzing your state’s VRL [voter registration list] for NVRA and HAVA compliance, i.e., that your state’s VRL only includes eligible voters.” The signing state, in turn, commits to, within 45 days of receiving such notice, “clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters and resubmit the updated VRL/Data to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to verify proper list maintenance has occurred by your state pursuant to the NVRA and HAVA.”
But several things about this arrangement raise red flags. The MOU contains language regarding restrictions on dissemination, but it does not appear to restrict sharing with the Department of Homeland Security, and its safety safeguards do not appear to apply to contractors who may access the information. And the MOU doesn’t include any criteria for which registrations should be removed. Thus, the Department of Justice could choose to target registrants they believe are likely to vote Democratic in key districts.
Read literally, the MOU doesn’t require states to remove the specific voters flagged by the feds—only that the state “remov[e] ineligible voters” after the department sends the state a list of any concerns it found while reviewing the voter registration list. But it does require the state to send the list back to the department “to verify proper list maintenance has occurred.”
The MOU does not specify what would happen if the Justice Department determines that proper list maintenance has not occurred. Litigation is unlikely to succeed; as mentioned above, the actual list maintenance requirements set forth in NVRA and HAVA are modest. But the feds could put the offending state on blast if it signs the MOU and then refuses to remove all voters the department identifies for removal.
The MOU does not seem to have been especially well received, as indicated by the fact that some states agreed to turn over the data without signing it. Perhaps states did not welcome the prospect that the department might point to the agreement while pressuring them to remove specific registrants. Or perhaps they feared litigation from a different direction: The Democratic National Committee (DNC) sent letters to states that were reportedly considering the MOU to warn them that removing all voters flagged by the department could violate the notice-and-waiting-period provision as well as the quiet period. (In response, Civil Rights Division head Dhillon inexplicably warned the DNC to “think twice before interfering in a federal investigation and encouraging the obstruction of justice, unless they’d like to join the dozens of states that are learning their lesson in federal court.”)
The Justice Department Makes Its Case in Court
The Justice Department argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) entitles it to state voter rolls. (In the first eight suits it filed, it also raised arguments under HAVA and the NVRA. But it seems to have had a change of heart. In the subsequent 22 suits—every complaint filed since Dec. 2, 2025—it dropped the HAVA and NVRA claims and relied solely on the CRA.)
The CRA was a relatively obscure waystation on the road to broader legislation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As relevant here, the act requires that each election officer retain for 22 months following an election “all records and papers which come into his possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.” Any record whose retention is required under the act must be provided to the attorney general upon demand in writing, which “shall contain a statement of the basis and the purpose therefor.” These provisions proved helpful in allowing the Kennedy administration to assemble evidence of racially discriminatory voter registration practices.
(The CRA made the news recently as the basis for the search warrant that enabled the federal government to seize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. A federal magistrate judge found probable cause that evidence pertaining to violations of the act’s document retention provisions would be found within the county election office.)
There is some precedent for using the CRA to obtain specific state voter lists. According to an amicus brief filed by former Justice Department lawyers who worked on voting enforcement in the Civil Rights Division, in 2006 and 2008 the department used the CRA to obtain the voter lists of Georgia and Texas, respectively, to ensure compliance with the NVRA. In both instances, the states entered into an agreement with the department to provide the materials. But there is no precedent for using the CRA—or any other act—to obtain voter rolls nationwide.
The Record So Far: 0 for 3
So far, each district court to have adjudicated a state-filed motion to dismiss has granted it. The rulings came from Judge David Carter, a Clinton appointee in the Central District of California; Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, a Biden appointee in the District of Oregon; and Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee (and pre-appointment Federalist Society member) in the Western District of Michigan.
Judges Carter and Kasubhai held that the motion to dismiss should be granted because the Justice Department failed to provide an adequate “statement of the basis and purpose” of its request as required by the CRA. Both judges concluded that the department’s asserted purpose, to investigate voter registration list maintenance procedures, was an invalid use of the CRA, which they held must be used to advance the purposes of the act. In Kasubhai’s words, a demand for records under the CRA “must relate to a purpose of investigating violations of individuals’ voting rights.” Carter went further and concluded that the stated purpose was “contrived” and therefore invalid; he wrote that the “requests to states for voter roll data go beyond their purported compliance check with the NVRA and into the territory of comprehensive data collection.”
The judges also concluded that the Justice Department had failed to provide a “basis” for the request, which Carter defined as “the reasoning provided by the DOJ regarding the evidence behind its investigation of a particular state and specific, articulable facts pointing to the violation of federal law.”
Carter further held that the request violated several privacy statutes, including the Privacy Act, which requires the federal government to publish a notice, and seek public comment, when collecting new information from the public that exceeds the scope of prior collections. He rejected the Department of Justice’s argument that earlier notices published by the Civil Rights Division, covering different material, provided sufficient notice to the public regarding the scope of information that would be collected here. Kasubhai declined to reach the applicability of the privacy statutes.
Judge Jarbou, by contrast, rejected challenges to the Justice Department’s purpose, finding that the text of the CRA did not support the state’s proposed limitations on the purposes for which the statute could be used. She further concluded that the department had indeed provided a basis by flagging in a letter to Michigan “several purported anomalies within Michigan’s voter registration data: a high percentage of registered voters, a low confirmation notice rate, a low voter removal rate, and a high duplicate registration rate.” (The Justice Department cited similar anomalies in its letters to California and Oregon; Carter ignored them in his opinion; Kasubhai disregarded them because the letter that noted them did not did not cite the CRA as the basis for the request; a subsequent letter cited the CRA but did not reference the anomalies.)
Instead, Jarbou ruled against Michigan for a different reason: She concluded that the voter registration list did not fit within the scope of the statute, which covers “records and papers which come into [the state’s] possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.” She reasoned that “come into possession” logically refers to something that one obtains rather than creates—and that each of the terms in the remainder of the sentence “refers to something that the voter submits or does as part of the registration process.” She further noted that the CRA requires the retention of any document subject to disclosure. “But nothing in the CRA’s text,” she concluded, “implies an intent to require states to preserve every election-related record that they create. And if the states can destroy records that they create, then they also have no obligation to disclose them.”
Like Kasubahi, Jarbou did not reach the privacy claims. All three judges rejected the subsequently abandoned HAVA and NVRA arguments.
What Happens Next?
The Department of Justice is seeking expedited appeal of all three decisions; the Sixth Circuit granted its request, and briefing will be complete by April 20, three weeks later than the department sought. (The request for expedited appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit may be hampered by the department’s lengthy delays in filing notices of appeal in the California and Oregon cases.)
If the Department of Justice prevails in its litigation efforts and obtains the lists, then what? The losing state will not have signed an MOU and will be under no obligation to inform the department about what changes, if any, it made in response to the department’s review. The Justice Department could attempt to use its review to allege that states are not engaging in “reasonable” list maintenance. But it is unlikely to prevail in any such suit—and has basically zero chance of doing so before Aug. 4, when the 90-day “quiet period” begins before the midterm elections. (As the NAACP, an intervenor in the California case, noted in its opposition to the Justice Department’s motion to expedite, the recent NVRA list maintenance against Michigan, mentioned above, took more than four years from start to finish.)
Yet the Justice Department claims in its motion to expedite that “California’s voters and election officials need a quick answer” and that “[a]bsent a final Court determination on this matter there is no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.” Taken at its word, the department expects to scour the lists, find erroneous registrations, and persuade California’s authorities to remove them by Aug. 4. (This does not explain, however, the Justice Department’s mystifying statement that an expedited appeal is necessary to avoid “federal Courts ordering last-minute changes.” A court could not lawfully order such changes that would require completion after Aug. 4, and it is practically impossible for any new litigation to be resolved by then.)
Yogi Berra allegedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” (Turns out he probably didn’t say it.) Whatever the fate of the Department of Justice’s lawsuits, one prediction seems safe: The Trump team will use both the state voter registration lists they have received and the fact that they have not received such lists from other states in an effort to cast doubt on the outcomes of the midterm elections. And that, for an administration facing stiff headwinds as November approaches, counts as a win.
