Trump push for state voter rolls rebuffed by courts as midterms near

Highlights
- Trump's opponents say push for voter data is part of effort to
'nationalise' elections
- Justice Department says it seeks to ensure state voting procedures
prevent fraud
- Legal experts say Trump uses election litigation to sow doubts
about legitimacy
- Republicans locked in battle for control of Congress in midterms
As the US midterm elections approach, Democrats are winning
legal challenges to the Trump administration's push to obtain states' voter
rolls, dealing a blow to the president's unprecedented effort to expand the
federal government's role in elections.
The Democratic-run states'
victories come as their party is locked in a fierce battle to take back both
houses of Congress from President Donald Trump's Republicans in the November 3
midterms.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona dismissed a Justice
Department lawsuit demanding the state's voter rolls, including sensitive
information such as partial Social Security numbers. That marked the sixth
defeat for the Trump administration in such a case so far this year, after
judges in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island
dismissed similar cases.
Litigation surrounding US federal
elections has become common, with Democrats and aligned voting rights groups
generally challenging state laws they believe restrict the right to vote and
Republicans and their allies challenging state voting practices they say leave
elections vulnerable to fraud. Trump asserts, falsely, that his 2020 election
loss was due to fraud.
But the Justice Department's
efforts to obtain states' voter rolls highlight a new dynamic this election
cycle: voting rights groups are increasingly finding themselves in court fighting
against the federal government.
"This year, we have the added
layer of the Department of Justice being perhaps the main player in voter
suppression litigation," said Lis Frost, a lawyer with Elias Law Group,
which has intervened in the voter data demand lawsuits on behalf of voting
rights groups. "This DOJ has taken on the mantle that was previously
carried by right-wing organisations to try to argue that there are voters on
the rolls that shouldn't be there and to try to remove voters from the rolls."
Frost's firm was founded by prominent election lawyer Marc Elias, an outspoken
Trump critic. The firm frequently represents the Democratic party and its
candidates in court.
Four of the judges who dismissed
the suits - three of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents and one of
whom was appointed by Trump during his first term - found that the federal
government did not articulate why it needed the unredacted data to carry out
oversight of state voting practices.
A fifth, Trump appointee Hala
Jarbou of Michigan, said the Justice Department adequately explained the basis
of its request but that the laws it cited did not require the state to hand
over the rolls. In Arizona, Trump appointee Susan Brnovich also found that
there was no legal requirement for the state to hand over the rolls.
The US Constitution assigns
individual states the role of administering federal elections.
To be sure, the Trump
administration could still prevail: it is appealing three of its losses, and 25
similar cases are pending. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who
leads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, has said she is prepared
to take the cases to the Supreme Court, where conservative justices hold a 6-3
majority.
In a statement, White House
spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said: "President Trump is committed to
ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of
elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free
of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters."
Trump calls for 'nationalising' elections
Since last year, the Justice
Department has sent letters to nearly every state seeking their voter rolls,
and asking for details about their procedures for removing ineligible
individuals like deceased people, convicted felons and non-citizens. Seventeen
states handed over their rolls voluntarily, Justice Department lawyers have
said. The department sued dozens of states, including several led by
Republicans, that did not comply.
In an interview with Fox News'
"Sunday Morning Futures" programme on 19 April, Dhillon said that the
department had reviewed 60 million voter records so far and found the names of
350,000 dead persons and 25,000 people who lacked proof of citizenship.
Dhillon did not provide evidence
that votes were cast for those names.
Trump and his allies have long
asserted states are not doing enough to prevent voter fraud, even though state
audits and academic studies have found it is rare.
Critics say Republicans are driven
less by concerns over election security than by an effort to gain political
advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of
eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.
Trump in February said in a podcast
interview that Republicans should "nationalise" and "take
over" voting, without giving details of what he intended.
Legal experts say the steps his
administration has taken in that direction are unlikely to survive challenges
in the courts.
Aside from the rulings over state
voter rolls, three federal judges in separate cases have blocked Trump's 2025
executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and
restricting the counting of mail ballots. The Justice Department is appealing.
A March 2026 executive order restricting mail-in voting has also drawn legal
challenges.
"He doesn't have the levers,
he doesn't have the switch, there is nobody he can order to federalise the
elections who will listen to him," said Justin Levitt, a former Justice
Department elections lawyer and current professor at Loyola Law School in Los
Angeles.
But even if the Justice Department
continues to lose in court, some legal experts said they expected Trump to
point to the legal battles to try to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the
midterms should Republicans lose. That would echo a playbook that Trump
deployed after his 2020 loss, when he used more than 60 defeats in legal
challenges to the election results to rally his base and undercut faith in the
reliability of the vote.
"This is using the legal
process, the law enforcement process to serve a propaganda role, to lead to
destabilisation and delegitimisation of future elections like in 2026,"
said David Becker, a former Justice Department election lawyer and now the
executive director of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research, a
non-partisan group that promotes election security.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that
Trump's claims have gained broad traction with the American public, with 46% of
respondents, including 82% of Republicans, agreeing with the statement that
large numbers of fraudulent ballots are cast by non-citizens.
Justice department cites civil rights law
In suing states to demand their
voter rolls, the department has cited the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The law,
passed to combat racial discrimination at a time when Southern states were
destroying Black Americans' voter registration records to cover up
disenfranchisement, requires states to preserve such records.
But the judge who dismissed the
lawsuit against California said the Justice Department's request for the most
populous US state's voter roll went beyond what Congress intended when it
passed the Civil Rights Act and other voting laws.
The judge, David Carter, said the
fact that the department had requested the data of so many states suggested
that the federal government was seeking to build a nationwide database of voter
information, rather than investigate alleged mismanagement by individual
states.
"The Department of Justice
seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely
different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential
voter data," Carter wrote in a 15 January decision.
The Santa Ana, California-based
judge said the Constitution requires that policy changes that could erode
privacy and voting rights must be decided by Congress.
"It cannot be the product of
an executive fiat," Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill
Clinton, wrote.
The prospect of a nationwide voter
database has alarmed voting rights activists, who are concerned that the
government is seeking to compare voter rolls with other sources of data to
purge people it believes are not citizens.
Those other sources may not have
up-to-date information on whether previously ineligible immigrants have since
become naturalised citizens, said Renata O'Donnell, senior litigation counsel
at Campaign Legal Centre, a nonprofit that works to expand voting access.
"People who should lawfully be
able to access the franchise are going to be disenfranchised," said
O'Donnell, whose organisation is representing voting rights groups that have
intervened in several voter roll cases.
















