The Justice Department asked federal judges to make states hand over their voter registration files, and 28 times in a row the judges have said no. The most recent loss came Nov. 10 in Delaware, where U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews dismissed the department’s suit. Not one court has given the Trump administration what it wanted.
The files at stake hold personal details such as driver’s license numbers, and Black voters have the most to lose when a list is used to decide who does not belong on it. Purges have a long record of catching eligible Black voters first, and the Brennan Center for Justice reported that the department said it wanted the lists to “purge voters it thinks don’t belong on the rolls.”
The legal tool is the Civil Rights Act of 1960, passed after Southern registrars refused Black applicants and hid their records. Title III let the department demand those records so it could prove discrimination. Today it is invoking the same provision to pull voter files out of state hands. Judge Andre Mathis of the Sixth Circuit, writing in June for a panel that upheld Michigan’s win, wrote that the government now “invokes Title III for an inverse purpose,” to ensure that some people have not voted.
The courts have mostly not even reached motive. They have read the statute. Judge Andrews wrote that he agreed “with the Sixth Circuit and other district courts that have determined that reading the demand provision of Title III to apply to documents received from third-party sources, rather than internally created documents, prevents conflicts between” federal voting laws. In Utah, Judge David Barlow, whom Trump appointed, held in October that a state voter database is not something an official “has come into possession of” when the state built it. His line: “courts have no warrant to elevate vague invocations of statutory purpose over the words Congress chose.”
That is the pattern across party lines. Democracy Docket, which has tracked every case, counts Trump appointees among the judges who ruled against the department. In Oregon, a judge cited the department’s “ulterior motives” in declining to extend it the usual presumption that the government acts in good faith.
The department has not stopped. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads its Civil Rights Division, has said she is prepared to take the cases to the Supreme Court, and she has asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.
Supporters of the effort say clean rolls protect elections, and nobody disputes that states must maintain their lists. But the federal laws that govern list maintenance, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, already give states that job and set rules for it. The department has not shown the courts evidence of the widespread violations it says justify a national data grab. Its own record in court is 0 for 28.
The Civil Rights Division exists to defend the vote of people like the Black registrants Title III was written for. Spending its time, and taxpayers’ money, on a losing campaign to collect their personal data is a betrayal of that job. The next test is the Supreme Court, if Dhillon follows through on her promise to take it there.
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