Every decided federal case rejected the Justice Department’s demand for unredacted voter rolls

Since September 2025, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. for unredacted voter rolls containing confidential information about millions of Americans. The administration says it needs the data to enforce election law and investigate alleged noncitizen voting. ProPublica reviewed every resulting ruling: all 26 cases decided so far were dismissed. Four remain pending and one state settled.

The unanimity is not a product of partisan assignment. Eight of the deciding judges were appointed by Donald Trump, four by George W. Bush and 14 by Democratic presidents. The first seven complaints leaned on Trump’s March 2025 election-integrity order and federal statutes requiring states to maintain accurate voter lists. Judges held that those laws impose duties on states but do not give Washington the broad power it claimed to compel their current, unredacted databases.

The department then changed theories. Nineteen later suits invoked Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, a provision created to preserve election records so federal investigators could prove that Black citizens had been excluded from voting. Courts found that it covers registration documents rather than every database a state creates, and that the government had not supplied the required explanation for needing the records. Several judges said using that anti-discrimination law to search for supposedly unlawful voters inverted its purpose.

The cases matter beyond this losing streak. A national voter database could combine state records with immigration enforcement and other federal systems, creating both privacy risk and a mechanism for challenging eligibility at scale. Judges in California, Pennsylvania and Oregon cited public statements and litigation conduct as evidence that the stated legal rationale did not match the project’s actual aims.

The administration has appealed most losses and may seek Supreme Court review; only one appeal has been decided, and it upheld dismissal. The current record therefore does not end the project. It does establish something unusually concrete: across 26 randomly assigned courts, the government has yet to persuade a single judge that existing federal law authorizes this mass transfer of state voter data.