Voting rights groups sue DOJ to block national voter database

Common Cause and four individual Texas voters filed Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on April 21, 2026. The suit names Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ as defendants. Attorneys from the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Protect Democracy, the ACLU of DC, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School filed jointly on the plaintiffs' behalf.

The core legal claims are two: that the DOJ violated the 📖Privacy Act of 1974 by collecting millions of Americans' sensitive personal data without issuing the required public System of Records Notice, and that the data-collection campaign is arbitrary and capricious under the 📖Administrative Procedure Act.

The DOJ began demanding full voter rolls from states in spring 2025. The requests were not for the publicly available voter lists states routinely share. They asked for complete databases including full names, residential addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers or the last four digits, driver's license numbers, party registration, and complete voting histories. For the first time in American history, the federal government demanded that every state hand over its entire voter file to a central federal repository.

By April 2026, the Justice Department had sued at least 29 states and DC for refusing. At least 12 states — including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming — handed over data voluntarily.

The legal basis the DOJ initially cited was Title III of the 📖Civil Rights Act of 1960 — a provision allowing the federal government to inspect voter registration records to investigate potential violations. In the first eight lawsuits, DOJ also raised the NVRA and HAVA; in the subsequent 22 lawsuits, it dropped HAVA and NVRA claims and relied solely on the 1960 📖Civil Rights Act. Six federal district courts — in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Arizona — have dismissed DOJ's state lawsuits on the merits. DOJ has appealed each ruling.

AG Bondi's January 25, 2026 letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made the connection between immigration enforcement and voter rolls explicit. The letter, sent hours after federal agents shot and killed a man during an immigration raid in Minneapolis, demanded Minnesota's voter registration files — including Social Security and driver's license numbers — as one condition for the state to restore the rule of law. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon rejected the demand. A federal judge in Oregon called the Bondi letter evidence of improper DOJ motives.

The DOJ confirmed in March 2026 that it plans to share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security to run through a system called SAVE — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. SAVE is a DHS citizenship-lookup database overhauled in 2025 to allow name, date-of-birth, and Social Security number queries. DOJ voting section chief Eric Neff told a Rhode Island court that SAVE checks for noncitizens and deceased voters are the stated purpose of the data collection. In the same March 2026 hearing, DOJ lawyer James Tucker denied the government is building a national voter database — while confirming the data-sharing plan.

SAVE doesn't work cleanly. Investigations by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found the system persistently misidentifies voters — particularly naturalized citizens born outside the United States — as noncitizens. In Boone County, Missouri, state officials directed election administrators to suspend voters SAVE flagged, but more than half of those flagged were confirmed U.S. citizens. DHS had to correct SAVE data provided to at least five states after errors were found. Texas and Louisiana ran their entire voter rolls through SAVE and found very small numbers of potential noncitizens — consistent with prior state-level reviews showing noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.

On April 3, 2026 — eighteen days before the lawsuit was filed — Kilian Kagle, the chief FOIA officer and senior component privacy official for DOJ's 📖Civil Rights Division, resigned. Kagle's resignation was first reported by NPR. He declined to explain his reasons publicly. The DOJ had issued no privacy impact assessment and no System of Records Notice for its voter data collection or its plan to share that data with DHS, despite federal law requiring both before an agency collects or disseminates personally identifiable information for a new purpose.

The Brennan Center for Justice obtained the DOJ's confidential memoranda of understanding sent to compliant states. The documents show DOJ planned to archive voter data permanently rather than destroy it after analysis — creating what Brennan Center senior counsel Eileen O'Connor called a permanent federal registry of voters' sensitive information that will always be available. The agreements also allowed password-only access to the data, no multifactor authentication, and no audit-log review process — meaning no one would track who accessed the files or flag misuse.

Federal election law historically reserves voter registration administration to the states. The Constitution's Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4) gives states primary authority to set voter registration rules, with Congress empowered to override. No prior administration had tried to centralize all 50 states' voter registration databases into a single federal repository. The Bipartisan Policy Center has documented that the U.S. has never had a national voter list — a structural choice rooted in 📖federalism and the risk of a single point of failure for election integrity.

With voter rolls from all 50 states in one federal repository, the administration could cross-reference registrations against immigration databases, SAVE, or any other federal dataset and challenge eligibility en masse. As of April 2026, the Trump administration had already promoted a program encouraging states to purge flagged voters before the November elections. The November 2026 midterm elections place the NVRA's 90-day systematic-purge cutoff at approximately August 7, 2026, creating a hard deadline for any federally coordinated mass challenge to registrations. Common Cause's lawsuit asks the DC district court to block DOJ from further data collection and from running any existing data through SAVE pending a ruling.