by Michael Casey / Associated Press – Fox5 San Diego / Dec 2, 2025 /
The Justice Department on Tuesday, Dec. 2, sued six more states in its ongoing campaign to obtain detailed voter data and other election information.
The department announced it was suing Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington over their “failure” to produce statewide voter registration lists. It has portrayed the litigation as part of an effort to ensure the security of elections, but Democratic officials have raised concerns over how the data will be used and whether the department will follow privacy laws in protecting it.
Tuesday’s actions bring to at least 14 the number of states the Justice Department has sued in its quest for the voter information [including California].
“Our federal elections laws ensure every American citizen may vote freely and fairly,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division. “States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results.”
The department has requested the voter data from at least 26 states, according to an Associated Press tally. It’s prompted concerns among some election officials because states have the constitutional authority to run elections and federal law protects the sharing of individual data with the government.
It also signals the transformation of the Justice Department’s involvement in elections under President Donald Trump. (For more of this article, go here.)
California and Other States Were Sued by DOJ in September for Declining to Turn Over Voter Rolls
LA Times / September 25, 2025
The U.S. Justice Department sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Thursday, Sept. 24, for failing to hand over the state’s voter rolls, alleging she is unlawfully preventing federal authorities from ensuring state compliance with federal voting regulations and safeguarding federal elections against fraud.
The Justice Department also sued Weber’s counterparts in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, who have similarly declined its requests for their states’ voter rolls.
However, read what Atty Gen Pam Bondi had the audacity to declare in a statement on the litigation:
“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections. Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure — states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.”
This from Trump’s DOJ, the guy who tried like hell to overturn the 2020 election.
In its lawsuit against Weber, who is the state’s top elections official, the Justice Department argues that it is charged — including under the National Voter Registration Act — with ensuring that states have proper protocols for registering voters and maintaining accurate and up-to-date rolls, and therefore is due access to state voter rolls in order to ensure they are so maintained.
“The United States has now been forced to bring the instant action to seek legal remedy for Defendants’ refusal to comply with lawful requests pursuant to federal law,” the lawsuit states.
Weber, in a statement, called the lawsuit “a fishing expedition and pretext for partisan policy objectives,” a “blatant overreach” and “an unprecedented intrusion unsupported by law or any previous practice or policy of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
“The U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to utilize the federal court system to erode the rights of the State of California and its citizens by trying to intimidate California officials into giving up the private and personal information of 23 million California voters,” Weber said.
She said California law requires that state officials “protect our voters’ sensitive private information,” and that the Justice Department not only “failed to provide sufficient legal authority to justify their intrusive demands,” but ignored invitations from the state for federal officials to come to Sacramento and view the data in person — a process Weber said was “contemplated by federal statutes” and would “protect California citizens’ private and personal data from misuse.”
The Justice Department has demanded a “current electronic copy of California’s computerized statewide voter registration list”; lists of “all duplicate registration records in Imperial, Los Angeles, Napa, Nevada, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, and Stanislaus counties”; a “list of all duplicate registrants who were removed from the statewide voter registration list” and the dates of their removals.
It has also demanded a list of all registrations that have been canceled because voters in the state died; an explanation for a recent decline in the recorded number of “inactive” voters in the state; and a list of “all registrations, including date of birth, driver’s license number, and last four digits of Social Security Number, that were cancelled due to non-citizenship of the registrant.”
The litigation is the latest move by the Trump administration to push its demands around voting policies onto individual states, which are broadly tasked under the Constitution with managing their own elections.
The lawsuit follows an executive order by Trump in March that purported to radically reshape voting rules nationwide, including by requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship and requiring states to disregard mail ballots that are not received by election day.
The order built on years of unsubstantiated claims by Trump — and refuted by experts — that the U.S. voting system currently allows for rampant fraud and abuse, and that those failures compromised the results of elections, including his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
Various voting rights groups and 19 states, including California, have sued to block the order.
Advocacy groups say the order, and especially its requirements for proving citizenship, would disenfranchise legal U.S. citizen voters who lack ready access to identifying documents such as passports and Real IDs. They have said barring the acceptance of mail ballots received after election day would also create barriers for voters, especially in large states such as California that need time to process large volumes of ballots.
California accepts ballots if they are postmarked by election day and received within a certain number of days after.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has called Trump’s executive order an “illegal power grab” that California and other states will “fight like hell” to stop. His office referred questions about the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Weber to Weber’s office. …
Weber, who in April called Trump’s executive order “an illegal attempt to trample on the states and Congress’s constitutional authority over elections,” said Thursday [Sept. 24, 2025] that she would not be bowed by the lawsuit.
“The sensitive data of California citizens should not be used as a political tool to undermine the public trust and integrity of elections,” she said. “I will always stand with Californians to protect states’ rights against federal overreach and our voters’ sensitive personal information. Californians deserve better. America deserves better.”
Many requests included basic questions about the procedures states use to comply with federal voting laws, such as how they identify and remove duplicate voter registrations or deceased or otherwise ineligible voters. Certain questions were more state-specific and referenced data points or perceived inconsistencies from a recent survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Some states have sent the department redacted versions of their voter lists, which in many cases are also available to the public. But the Justice Department also has requested copies that contain personally identifiable information, including voters’ names, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers.
The New Mexico Secretary of State’s office said it already provided the Justice Department with voter data that is publicly available, but said it’s legally prevented from turning over “personal private voter information,” office spokesperson Alex Curtas said in a statement.
Rhode Island Attorney General Attorney Peter Neronha said his office was aware of the lawsuit and called it the “latest example of the weaponization of the Department of Justice to further the Trump administration’s unlawful whims.”
“We stand with and will defend the secretary, and win, because lawsuits concerning lawful conduct are largely unsuccessful,” Neronha said. “But I’m not surprised that this administration is confused about what it means to behave lawfully.”
The Justice Department’s actions come alongside Trump’s push to investigate the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and influence the 2026 midterms.
At the same time, voting rights groups have sued the administration, arguing that recent updates to a federal tool for verifying citizenship could result in voters being unlawfully purged from voter lists.
Last month, 10 Democratic secretaries of state asked the Trump administration to provide more information about its wide-ranging efforts to seek the statewide voter registration lists. They cited concerns that federal agencies have apparently misled them and might be entering the data in a program used to verify U.S. citizenship.
