Trump's effort to get state voter rolls hits a brick wall in courts

The opposition to the Trump DOJ's demands is bipartisan. Some GOP states are fighting to protect personal voter info and 7 of 15 District Court judges who rejected the requests are Trump appointees.Show Caption

WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump has fought to exert more federal control over elections, courts have unanimously rejected his Justice Department's contention that it should have access to state voter rolls.The department has lost all 16 federal court decisions issued so far over its demands for voter lists with personal information such as addresses, dates of birth and driver's license and Social Security numbers, which local officials contend would create a “sweeping surveillance tool."It’s not just Democrats fighting the Republican administration in dozens of lawsuits nationwide. GOP officials in states such as Idaho, Kentucky, Utah and West Virginia also fought the requests. And seven of the the 15 U.S. District Court judges who ruled against Trump were appointed by him.At stake in the litigation is whether the federal government can police state voter lists and potentially create a national database, as part of Trump’s effort to prevent noncitizens from voting. But judges have ruled unanimously that states run elections, not the federal government.What's more, some states say, the unprecedented attempt at federal oversight of elections is an attempt to solve a problem that's all but nonexistent. Trump continued to complain about election security, including noncitizen voting, in a White House speech July 16. But judges, election experts and even Republican state officials say allegations of noncitizen voting are "inaccurate" and "not a systemic problem.""Idaho is fully committed to supporting President's Trump goal of ensuring that only U.S. citizens are registered and actually vote in Idaho," James Craig, a lawyer in Republican Attorney General Raul Labrador's office, wrote to federal officials July 10 in urging them to drop the litigation. Craig responded to offers of federal assistance by suggesting officials "stop threatening your friends in Idaho."The court decisions are urgent because the Nov. 3 congressional midterms are approaching, and a 1993 law forbids broadly purging voter rolls during the 90 days before an election, or after Aug. 5. Two appeals courts agreed to hasten their review of lower court decisions."The Justice Department is committed to ensuring that our elections are accurate, fair, and secure, and that starts with clean, up-to-date voter rolls," Harmeet Dhillon, who is leading the lawsuits as head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, told USA TODAY. "We are confident in the legal basis for these cases and will continue to pursue them vigorously, including on appeal."Voter rolls fight started with Trump executive orderTrump signed an executive order in March 2025 that directed the DOJ to prioritize preventing noncitizens from voting. The president said he has the "unavoidable duty" to secure elections by taking steps such as ensuring the citizenship of voters.Dhillon then began demanding voter rolls from the states to check the names for citizenship and inaccuracies such as people who moved or died. She cited the 1960 Civil Rights Act in justifying her request for the names and identifying information. And she cited the 2002 Help America Vote Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act as requiring states to ensure only eligible voters are on the voter lists."Federal law requires states to make reasonable efforts to maintain accurate registration lists, and where states fall short, this Department will act to enforce that obligation," Dhillon said in a statement.The administration seeks to check state voter lists against the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, which a judge has blocked as "inaccurate" and "unreliable" for that purpose.Election experts said the Constitution gives states the authority to administer elections, and the 1974 Privacy Act aims to prevent sharing personal information about voters the way the executive branch seeks.“The Department of Justice has no power – none – to purge the voter rolls," Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former DOJ official in the Obama and Biden administrations, told USA TODAY. “The courts aren’t buying what the Department of Justice is selling."So far 23 mostly Republican-led states provided the voter information. But officials in many states refused, citing privacy laws against sharing the personal information and the lack of federal authority over the lists. The DOJ then sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the unredacted lists.Trump-appointed judges rule against administrationFifteen U.S. District Court judges – nine appointed by Republicans, including seven appointed by Trump – and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have rejected the department's demands as unlawful.“The government's request is unprecedented and illegal,” U.S. District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles said in one of the earliest decisions, issued Jan. 15. “It is not for the Executive, or even this Court to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans. That power belongs solely to Congress.”The Constitution provides that states determine the "Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections."“As a former DOJ attorney, the idea of going 0-15 in cases – you can’t even wrap your head around it,” said David Becker, a former senior trial attorney for the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told USA TODAY. “It’s just remarkable.”But Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15 that most of the cases remain under appeal and that some judges sided with some of the department's positions.For example, U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell in Florida ruled July 7 that four Republican-led states could use the SAVE database to check the citizenship of voters. His decision conflicted with that of U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, DC, who halted use of the "unreliable" database June 22.Some Republican election officials take a standRepublican election officials in a handful of states are among those fighting the DOJ’s demands.Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams argued the request for the state to surrender personally identifying information about millions of voters would turn a "little-used provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960" into "a sweeping surveillance tool."Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who oversees the state's elections, argued that the department’s demand for records was “unlawful.”West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner said he agrees with the goal of policing voter rolls but that turning over sensitive voter data would violate state law. He noted that the judge found "no indication" that West Virginia had a problem with its maintenance of voter registration lists.Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane told federal officials in December he recognized the DOJ’s authority under the Civil Rights Act to request election-related records. But in February, McGrane said he learned from another lawsuit about the transmission of personally identifiable information outside approved channels.The DOJ acknowledged in a court filing Jan. 16 that members of a Trump advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency got access to Social Security Administration information in March 2025 contrary to previous denials. An unnamed political advocacy group asked two of the DOGE members to analyze state voter rolls with a goal of finding "voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the DOJ said in the filing.“While I appreciate the Department’s representations that Idaho’s data will be safeguarded, I cannot take that now-apparent risk in the absence of clear legal duty to do so,” McGrane wrote.Trump administration contends it's fighting fraudDespite Trump's demands to check state voter rolls for fraud, studies have found few examples of noncitizens voting − presumably because the documentation required to vote is also what would make it easy to be charged criminally."This notion that noncitizens are voting in large quantities is fiction," said Levitt, the former DOJ election lawyer. "You are leaving a trail of criminal behavior that is going to be discovered."Federal authorities cite a handful of recent examples in pending cases.Two Pakistani men were charged in New Jersey for allegedly attesting to being U.S. citizens when they registered to vote and then cast ballots in the 2020 election. A lawful permanent resident from Australia was charged in Louisiana with making false statements and fraudulent voting in 2022 and 2024. And a Chinese student at the University of Michigan was charged with registering to vote using a student ID and voting in the 2024 election before jumping bail and flying back to China, officials said.“Illegal voting is a serious crime that cast doubt on our elections and serves to disenfranchise United States citizens by diluting their power at the ballot box," U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon in Michigan said of the Chinese suspect.Following Trump’s July 16 speech, the Department of Homeland Security said more than 250,000 noncitizens were illegally registered to vote in four states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. But the department didn’t document how it arrived at that estimate.DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters July 17 to election officials in the four states urging them to check voter rolls in the federal SAVE database. At a news conference, he threatened criminal penalties for officials who don’t secure their elections.“If the election officials, once we gave them the information that they need to secure their elections and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time," Mullin said.Dhillon, earlier this month, sent letters to election officials in all 50 states threatening criminal investigations of election officials if noncitizens are found to have voted in the 2026 election. Federal monitors are being sent to six states: Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia, Dhillon said in a social media video July 8."An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation" of federal law, Dhillon said.Henderson, the Utah Republican, responded to "threats of criminal prosecution" on social media July 7 as "truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights."States say they're already policing their voter rollsStates documented how much they already police their voter rolls – and how small the problem of noncitizens voting is.In Utah, a yearlong audit of voter registration released in May found 27 noncitizens who were removed from voter rolls out of more than 2 million voters. Eight noncitizens voted in the 2020 election and four each in 2018 and 2024.In Idaho, state officials worked with federal authorities to verify the citizenship of 1.1 million registered voters before the 2024 election. State officials referred 34 people for criminal investigation of noncitizen registration or voting, but none had voted in the primary or general elections that year.Another 15 cases were referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in August 2025 for possible prosecution.Texas began routinely auditing county voter rolls in 2021. After the 2022 election, an audit of Harris County, which includes Houston and had nearly 2.6 million registered voters, removed 1,136 noncitizens. After the 2024 election, an audit of Val Verde County, which sits along the border with Mexico and had 30,000 registered voters, found one noncitizen who was removed.Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry announced in September that checking state voter lists dating to the 1980s against DHS's SAVE database revealed 390 noncitizens who registered to vote and 79 who cast a ballot in at least one election. The state has about 2.9 million voters.“I want to be clear: noncitizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” said Landry, a Republican.