Voting rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit on April 21 accusing the U.S. Department of Justice of setting in motion a process that could result in the improper removal of eligible voters from registration rolls ahead of the November midterm elections.
The complaint, brought in Washington, D.C., by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Protect Democracy Project, asks a federal judge to stop the Justice Department from obtaining or using states' registers of voters and to delete voter data the agency has already obtained.
At the center of the suit is an initiative by the Trump administration to broaden federal involvement in election administration during a year when Republicans are competing to retain control of both houses of Congress. The complaint notes that the U.S. Constitution assigns responsibility for running elections to individual states, and it records that 18 states have either already agreed to provide voter data or have indicated plans to do so.
The filing accuses the department of seeking to amass sensitive personal information on millions of Americans without authorization from Congress, and it quotes the complaint as stating: "The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an illegal and unprecedented quest to stockpile millions of Americans’ confidential voter data," and alleges the department was creating "a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus."
Justice Department lawyers have characterized the agency's actions differently, saying the department must ensure that states are taking appropriate steps to exclude ineligible individuals from voter rolls. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuit.
Beginning last year, the Justice Department requested unredacted copies of state voter rolls, including drivers' license numbers and portions of Social Security numbers. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, told an interviewer on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" program that the department had reviewed 60 million voter records to date and had identified 350,000 names it said belonged to deceased persons and 25,000 people who allegedly lacked documentation of citizenship. Dhillon did not provide evidence that ballots had been cast in the names of those individuals.
In response to resistance from some states, the Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and also against Washington, D.C., seeking access to their voter lists. Federal judges in five states have dismissed those department lawsuits, finding the agency did not justify its demands.
The separate lawsuit filed on April 21 contends the department plans to use the voter data to instruct states to strike names from registration lists on the basis of verification approaches that are flawed and prone to error. The complaint warns such procedures could produce "false positives" whereby eligible citizens would be wrongly removed from the rolls.
Legal posture and immediate stakes
The lawsuit directly challenges the scope of federal authority in election oversight and seeks both prospective relief - barring future access and use of state voter data - and remedial relief - deleting data already obtained. It arrives against a backdrop of contested litigation between the Justice Department and a number of states that have declined to share voter lists.
How courts respond to the claims could determine whether the department can continue to request and analyze unredacted voter information, and whether any data already collected may be retained or must be purged.