A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday sustained a court order that blocks the Department of Justice from securing Michigan’s voter rolls, a setback for the administration’s effort to expand federal involvement in state-run election administration. The ruling came from the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The litigation takes place against the backdrop of a closely contested struggle for control of both chambers of Congress ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, a fact cited as part of the political stakes around federal election oversight.
The U.S. Constitution assigns states the primary responsibility for running federal elections, while reserving certain oversight authorities for the federal government. The recent push by the administration to gain broader access to state voter lists follows long-standing public statements from President Donald Trump asserting that states are failing to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots. Trump, who continues to assert without evidence that his 2020 election defeat resulted from fraud, has urged Republicans to "nationalize" and "take over" voting.
Beginning last year, the Justice Department sent letters to election officials in nearly all 50 states seeking their voter lists. Those requests sought sensitive identifying details, including partial Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth. According to the record in the litigation, at least 17 Republican-led states voluntarily turned over that information. By contrast, dozens of states - including several led by Republicans - resisted the requests, frequently citing concerns that sharing such information would violate voters’ privacy rights.
When the Justice Department pressed the matter through litigation, it sued 30 states and the District of Columbia, seeking court orders to compel production of unredacted voter lists. The department has argued that access to the full, unredacted lists is necessary to determine whether states are adequately removing ineligible voters from their registration rolls. At the trial court level, the Justice Department has not prevailed in any case that has been decided so far.
In the Michigan lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou ruled that voter rolls are not included among the documents the federal government is entitled to demand under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. That law, enacted to address racial discrimination at a time when some Southern states destroyed Black Americans’ voter registration records to conceal efforts at disenfranchisement, requires preservation of certain records. Judge Jarbou concluded that the statute did not give the federal government authority to compel states to hand over state-created registration lists in unredacted form.
The Justice Department appealed Judge Jarbou’s interpretation, describing her reading of the Civil Rights Act as "novel and incorrect." Lawyers representing Michigan countered that Jarbou correctly drew a distinction between materials submitted to the state by voters - which they said the federal government could demand - and records generated by the state itself, such as voter rolls, which they contended fall outside the reach of the 1960 law.
Judge Jarbou was appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term.
Voting rights advocates have voiced apprehension about the administration’s broader approach, warning that comparing state voter rolls with other data sources to identify individuals believed to be noncitizens could lead to erroneous removals from rolls. Their concern is that the external databases the administration might use may not reliably reflect subsequent naturalization by immigrants who were previously ineligible to vote, creating a risk of disenfranchisement for some voters.