Suing thirty states and the District of Columbia for their voter rolls

Editor's note: the demands and the suits are documented and courts have dismissed the suits, but no court has found the demands themselves an unlawful or retaliatory use of power.

The countervailing case is not trivial. Congress charged the Attorney General with enforcing the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, both of which require states to maintain accurate voter lists. Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 authorizes the Attorney General to demand the production and inspection of election records. The department says it is examining compliance with list-maintenance duties, that the transfer would be intergovernmental rather than public, and that the statute's confidentiality provisions and the Privacy Act would bar disclosure. And the suits are not confined to states the administration opposes politically: Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Idaho were sued alongside Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

The Civil Rights Division requested the full statewide voter-registration list from forty-seven states, unredacted, including dates of birth and driver's license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Election officials from both parties declined, citing state privacy law and the absence of federal authority. Some offered the public version of the list, which suppresses those fields; the department rejected the offers. Beginning in 2025 it sued, in waves, thirty states and the District of Columbia. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said accurate rolls are the foundation of election integrity, that clean rolls protect citizens from fraud, and that many state officials were choosing to fight the department in court rather than show their work.

The suits have not fared well. At least five federal courts have dismissed them, including in California and Oregon. In February 2026 a judge appointed by the president dismissed the Michigan case, holding that none of the three statutes the department invoked authorizes it to obtain unredacted lists. The department has continued to file and, in West Virginia, argued that federal supremacy and the Civil Rights Act's own nondisclosure provisions override state redaction requirements. This record is Tier B: the legal theory is colorable, the statutes do assign the Attorney General enforcement duties, and litigation continues. What is documented is a coordinated demand for the personal identifiers of every registered voter in the country, refused by officials of both parties and rejected so far by every court that has reached it. The elections executive orders are documented at ELP-02 and ELP-03.