Typically, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division focuses its voting-rights efforts on ensuring that Americans are free to cast a ballot. Under the second Trump administration, the division has trained its focus on a different project: strong-arming states to hand over sensitive voter information to the federal government. Since September 2025, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia to this effect.
“This is a top priority,” the division’s head, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, said on a podcast hosted by the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson last December. Examining these records would help DOJ identify supposed voting by noncitizens and stamp out voter fraud, Dhillon explained: “I think eventually we’re going to win these cases, all of them.” DOJ had never before sought to collect these data, and the ominous ambiguity as to what the government plans to do with the information left many experts and election officials alarmed over how this might be used to interfere with the midterm elections. In a letter to the Justice Department, a group of Democratic secretaries of state voiced “immense concern” over DOJ’s apparent plans to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security.
Nearly a year later, however, the number of victories secured by the Justice Department in this litigation stands at zero. DOJ has lost 26 cases in district court and triumphed in none; Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, in Washington, D.C., handed the administration its latest defeat just last Friday. (Several cases remain pending.) The administration’s demands have been rejected by judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans—including several nominated by President Trump himself—a run of losses that represents an embarrassing defeat for Dhillon’s project. More important than humiliation: DOJ’s wipeout demonstrates how America’s decentralized system of elections, aided by the courts, is working to limit Trump’s efforts to corrupt democracy. Anxious narratives about his administration interfering with elections often portray the president as a figure who “can just will his fantasies into existence,” says Justin Levitt, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. But the Justice Department’s prolonged losing streak, Levitt told me, “is a pretty clean rebuttal” of Trump’s supposed invincibility.
Elections in the United States are conducted at the state and local levels, and the federal government has little involvement or control over how officials across the country manage the voting process. State and local jurisdictions maintain their own voter rolls—detailed records of voter information that can include sensitive material such as addresses, driver’s licenses, and partial Social Security numbers. But Trump, seeking to eradicate a supposed plague of voting by noncitizens, has clashed with this system. (In reality, such illegal votes are extraordinarily rare.)
In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order tasking DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security with comparing state voter rolls against DHS systems. The plan had many problems. On the federal government’s end, the DHS program that the White House seemed to have in mind as a basis for comparison—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE—was not originally designed to serve as a master list of citizens and can be glitchy and incomplete. Many states were unimpressed by the demand. “Go jump in the Gulf of Maine,” Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said on receiving DOJ’s voter-file request in July 2025. The federal government had no authority to make such a request, Bellows told the Maine Morning Star: “If Congress thought it was appropriate that there be a national voter file, Congress could have authorized the Department of Justice to do that, but they have not.”
A number of red states willingly agreed to hand over their voter files to the Civil Rights Division, but most states—concerned about upholding their obligation to protect residents’ privacy—took Bellows’s approach. Then, in September, DOJ went to court. “American citizens have a right to feel confident in the integrity of our electoral process,” Dhillon said in a statement announcing the first lawsuits, against Oregon and Maine. The initial suits targeted blue states that were familiar adversaries of the Trump administration. As time went on, though, the Civil Rights Division began to file cases against purple states and even those of the deepest ruby red—such as Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Idaho. “We will continue to work closely with our federal partners,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, wrote in a letter to the Justice Department. But, he said, he could not share the voter rolls “in the absence of a clear legal requirement that Idaho provide a copy of its complete, unredacted voter list.”
[Paul Rosenzweig: Using the power of the government to win elections]
Dhillon regularly posted chirpy announcements on X heralding new lawsuits against states and providing updates. Behind the scenes, though, things were not going smoothly. The DOJ attorneys whose names appeared on court filings, several of whom had worked to cast doubt on the 2020 election results before joining the department, appeared to be struggling under the weight of litigating dozens of cases nationwide. DOJ requested voter data from the wrong officials, spent months emailing an incorrect address in Oklahoma, filed two cases in the wrong court, and uploaded a court document with internal comments still in the PDF. (Oklahoma eventually settled the lawsuit and provided its rolls.) At one point, the department trumpeted a judge’s ruling in Connecticut as a significant victory when the order did little more than set a schedule for the case.
DOJ’s lawsuits against red states also alienated potential GOP allies, especially when the Civil Rights Division sent out an aggressive letter that seemingly hinted at potential criminal prosecution for the election officials resisting DOJ’s demands. “This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights,” Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media. Even in red states that had agreed to share their voter records, the process was bumpy. After comparing its voter rolls against the SAVE database, Texas identified more than 2,500 voters as possible noncitizens, and some counties began removing them from the rolls; at least some of those individuals turned out to be Americans who had legally registered to vote.
In court, DOJ’s main issue has been that it simply has no legal basis for its requests. Two of the statutes that it relied on in early cases, the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, don’t authorize the sorts of requests being made. Judges disagreed over whether the main statute wielded by DOJ, Title III of the Civil Rights Act, applied to the voter rolls at all. Even if it did, many judges agreed, DOJ had provided no reason to think that an investigation under Title III was justified. The Justice Department’s arguments would allow it to “embark on a fishing expedition of voter records in any state looking for concerns, without identifying a single issue with the state’s policies beforehand,” wrote Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California.
Judge Carter and Judge Sooknanan pointed to the Privacy Act of 1974, a federal statute that imposes civil and criminal penalties if the federal government does not go through certain processes before collecting sensitive personal information. Justin Levitt told me that this reasoning could spell trouble for the department when it comes to the voter rolls collected voluntarily from red states. “I think it’s very hard to read this analysis and not think that in other instances, where they did get the data, that somebody committed a federal misdemeanor,” Levitt said. (Along with other alumni of the Civil Rights Division, he filed amicus briefs against the government in many of the voter-roll cases.)
DOJ has continued to rack up losses over the course of 2026. In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the first appeals court to weigh in on the issue, ruled against the government. “Very powerful dissents!” Dhillon wrote on X in August, after the Sixth Circuit declined to reconsider the case. Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested in August that DOJ might ask the Supreme Court to intervene, but the department has yet to do so. And the defeats are still rolling in: Last month, judges tossed out cases in Washington, Vermont, and Georgia. Judge Sooknanan’s ruling last week found the entire, nationwide program of seeking voter rolls to be unlawful—a particularly harsh reprimand.
Many of the judges who dismissed DOJ’s lawsuits expressed concern about the lack of clarity regarding what the federal government plans to do with the data. “It appears that the DOJ is on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database,” Carter wrote in his opinion. Several judges, pointing to press reports, raised questions as to whether the government intended to somehow use information contained in the voter rolls as part of an immigration-enforcement dragnet.
[Quinta Jurecic: Rules designed to create chaos]
Even if DOJ and DHS had been able to cobble together that exhaustive list, there is no obvious mechanism by which the federal government could use such a database to upend an election. “It’s a massive disconnect,” Levitt said, paraphrasing the administration’s reasoning: “Step one, collect voter files. Step three, elections with integrity. What’s step two?”
Had the Trump administration somehow identified supposedly illegitimate registrants on the voter rolls, it would not have been able to force states to remove voters against their will. Recently, for example, DHS informed Nevada that it had uncovered almost 16,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s publicly available voter lists, which lack the sensitive personal information that DOJ has been working to obtain. Under scrutiny, DHS “confirmed” only 185 of those names; according to Nevada, zero were actually noncitizens. Likewise, on Tuesday, DOJ sent similar letters to California demanding that the state withhold ballots from a list of “likely noncitizens” if it could not prove their citizenship. But even if California wanted to comply, the National Voter Registration Act prohibits mass purges of voters in the 90 days before the election. (Last year, in a decision now under review by the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that this provision also applies to potential noncitizens.)
DOJ’s quest for voter rolls is only one strand of the Trump administration’s larger effort to meddle with the midterms. Many of those plans have likewise fallen flat or been barred by the courts, such as the administration’s attempt to effectively make mail-in voting impossible. Others, such as DHS’s effort to bulk up the SAVE database, are moving forward but will likely lack broad effect on the vote this time around.
The Justice Department’s misadventures in seeking voter rolls are a reminder that just because the Trump administration tries something, that does not mean the plan is well conceived or destined for success. In this instance, it has been defeated by election officials, both Democrats and Republicans, who were committed to the nonpartisan work of putting democracy into practice.