Cybersecurity Policy Report, DoJ Widens Effort to Obtain States’ Unredacted Voter Rolls, (Aug 18, 2026)
A string of losses in federal court has not deterred the Department of Justice from attempting to obtain unredacted voter rolls from state election officials.
More than 20 federal district courts have told DoJ that the Civil Rights Act did not permit it to demand that states turn over voters’ personal information, including addresses and Social Security and driver’s license numbers. DoJ also suffered a loss at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (Cincinnati), which ruled against it over the summer and on Friday denied its request for a rehearing en banc (CPR, Aug. 17).
But DoJ has now filed new appeals in the 10th, Seventh, Third, and D.C. Circuits challenging its losses in district courts in Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., according to Democracy Docket, a voting rights advocacy group that’s tracking the cases.
“The latest filings bring DOJ’s active voter roll appeals to 19 cases across nine federal circuits, as the department continues defending the same theory courts around the country have repeatedly rejected: that Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives the attorney general authority to compel states to surrender complete statewide voter registration databases containing sensitive information,” Democracy Docket said in a news alert yesterday.
Attorney General Todd Blanche indicated over the weekend that the Trump administration might ask the Supreme Court to weigh in. “Absolutely. It’s a possibility,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
In DoJ’s most recent loss in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota yesterday, Judge Katherine Menendez recounted the department’s string of defeats.
“Including Minnesota, the government has sued more than two dozen states to obtain unredacted copies of their complete voter registration lists. Some states have agreed to provide the requested information to the government but others, including Minnesota, have not,” Judge Menendez noted in her ruling.
“While several federal courts have entered consent judgments in cases where states have agreed to provide the requested information to Plaintiff, federal courts in Michigan, Oregon, California, Maryland, Colorado, Wisconsin, Maine, Arizona, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Illinois, New Jersey, Kentucky, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Nevada have dismissed Plaintiff’s claims demanding production of unredacted statewide voter registration lists,” she said.
While most of the resistance to DoJ’s demands for unredacted voter data has come from states led by Democrats, where the DoJ’s attempt to involve itself in state-run elections is viewed with suspicion, Republican-led states have also balked, citing privacy laws. Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane (R.), for example, is being sued by DoJ in U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho over his refusal to provide the state’s unredacted voter rolls.
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