Judges Dismiss DOJ Voter Roll Lawsuits in Maine, Wisconsin

Federal judges in Maine and Wisconsin on Thursday dismissed lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking to compel the states to hand over detailed, unredacted voter registration information, dealing the Trump administration its seventh and eighth consecutive legal defeats in a nationwide campaign to obtain sensitive voter data. The rulings, issued by U.S. District Chief Judge Lance Walker in Maine and U.S. District Judge James Peterson in Wisconsin, reaffirm that states — not the federal government — retain primary authority over election administration.

Context: A Nationwide Legal Campaign

The DOJ has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to obtain unredacted voter registration lists, including dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. The administration has argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) authorize the federal government to demand this data to audit state compliance with voter roll maintenance requirements, according to AP News.

Of the eight cases that have been ruled on so far, all have been dismissed — a bipartisan pattern that includes four Trump appointees among the eight judges who have rejected the DOJ’s arguments.

The Maine Ruling

Chief Judge Lance Walker, a Trump appointee, granted Maine’s motion to dismiss, ruling that voter registration lists are not records subject to Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. In a sharply worded 22-page decision, Walker wrote that construing the Civil Rights Act “to implicitly provide the United States a right to every state’s [voter registration list] on demand for purposes of conducting a comprehensive, line-by-line audit of the state’s compliance with HAVA and the NVRA would take a sledgehammer to the balance Congress struck.”

“If the Department of Justice wants to enforce HAVA and the NVRA, it must use the pre-suit investigation and enforcement mechanisms that Congress provided in those statutes — which do not contemplate production of the unredacted computerized list to the Attorney General so that he might loom over the shoulder of the state election official,” Walker wrote, as reported by CBS News.

Walker also noted in a footnote that the DOJ’s attorney at oral argument emphatically denied that a national database was being created — a claim “almost immediately undermined by the issuance of an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a ‘State Citizenship List.’”

The Wisconsin Ruling

Judge James Peterson, an Obama appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission with prejudice, holding that statewide voter registration lists are not “records” that “come into possession” of election officials under the Civil Rights Act, as they are records created by the state itself.

“This court agrees with [previous rulings in Michigan and Arizona] that § 20701 does not encompass records created by state election officials, including voter registration lists,” Peterson wrote. “The government’s arguments to the contrary are not persuasive,” according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

Reactions from State Officials and Advocacy Groups

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is running for governor, welcomed the ruling. “Let me be clear — Trump and the DOJ may continue to try to interfere with free and fair elections run by the states. We will not let them,” Bellows said in a statement.

Bianca Shaw, state director of Common Cause Wisconsin, called the decision “a massive victory for voter privacy and a rejection of federal overreach.” She added: “The decision ensures voters are protected from an unauthorized national database that would have been a goldmine for hackers and a tool for intimidation.”

Doug Poland, director of litigation for Law Forward, a Wisconsin-based law firm, said the court “recognized this as an illegal attempt to gather and weaponize data on Americans, dressed up in the language of voting rights enforcement.”

Legal Analysis and Implications

The consistent rejection of the DOJ’s legal arguments across multiple jurisdictions suggests a fundamental flaw in the administration’s strategy. The DOJ has relied heavily on Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — a law enacted to combat racial discrimination in voting during the Jim Crow era, decades before the creation of modern computerized voter registration systems.

As Derek Clinger, senior attorney at the UW-Madison State Democracy Research Initiative, noted: “You’ve got this tricky interpretive question about whether or not this law written in 1960 was meant to apply to the concept of a statewide voter registration list, which did not exist for another four decades.”

Eileen O’Connor, senior attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, highlighted concerns about the scope of the DOJ’s demands: “They don’t say how they’re going to do it, what databases they would use, who would do it. They say they’re going to give it to a contractor to do it, and then they’ll send a list of individual names back to the state, and the states are supposed to agree to remove those voters, which turns election administration upside down.”

What’s Next

The DOJ has not yet indicated whether it will appeal either ruling. With more than 20 lawsuits still pending across the country, the administration faces an increasingly difficult legal landscape. The executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a “State Citizenship List” could represent an alternative path to creating a national voter database, though it would likely face its own legal challenges.

For now, the rulings reinforce a core principle of American election law: states, not the federal government, are the primary administrators of elections — a principle that judges across the political spectrum have been willing to defend.