Trump DOJ goes 0-8 as Maine and Wisconsin dismiss voter roll suits

On May 21, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit against Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine (docket 1:25-cv-00468). Walker — nominated by President Trump in 2018 and on October 11, 2018 — granted Bellows' motion to dismiss, ruling that the federal government's demand for Maine's voter registration list violated the constitutional structure of state-run elections.

Walker wrote that the DOJ's requests 'would require me to turn a blind eye to traditional practices of 📖federalism and how those expressions have found expression in American elections.' He separately described the government's Civil Rights Act claim as 'half-hearted.' Bellows' office the same day, calling it a complete vindication of Maine's refusal to hand over sensitive voter data. Bellows had rejected the DOJ's initial data request in August 2025 and filed a motion to dismiss in December. The League of Women Voters of Maine and two Maine voters intervened as co-defendants.

On the same day, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission in the Western District of Wisconsin. Peterson's found that Wisconsin's voter registration list isn't a record that election officials must retain under the 📖Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Peterson wrote that the statute requires officials to retain only records that 'come into his possession' — language he interpreted to mean 'receive' or 'acquire,' not documents a state itself creates. Because Wisconsin generates its own voter list rather than receiving it from an outside source, the Civil Rights Act's record-retention provision doesn't apply. Peterson was appointed by President Obama.

The twin May 21 dismissals brought the Trump DOJ's record to filed against states and the District of Columbia since 2025. The eight states that successfully dismissed the lawsuits are Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. Four of the eight judges who ruled against the DOJ — including Walker — were Trump appointees.

The DOJ has appealed the California, Michigan, and Oregon dismissals. Cases against approximately 23 states and D.C. remain active. At least 12 states — including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming — have voluntarily handed over their voter data without a court fight.

The DOJ's lawsuits invoke three federal statutes: the 📖Civil Rights Act of 1960, the 📖National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act. Federal judges across multiple districts have rejected each theory in turn. A judge in Massachusetts ruled that authorize 'the kind of fishing expedition' the DOJ seeks. The 📖Civil Rights Act of 1960 was designed for targeted election-integrity investigations involving discrimination claims, not wholesale data seizures.

The data DOJ demanded — detailed in DOJ's own — includes full names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers for every registered voter in each state. Voting rights groups argue that this combination of data fields constitutes a surveillance dossier on tens of millions of Americans — and that the DOJ's stated rationale of checking for noncitizens on voter rolls has never been supported by evidence of widespread noncitizen registration.

U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued the most pointed judicial rebuke of the DOJ's voter roll campaign in his of the Oregon case. Kasubhai — an Obama appointee in the District of Oregon — ruled that the DOJ 'can no longer be presumed to be acting in good faith.'

Kasubhai cited a letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to Minnesota officials that explicitly linked voter data demands to immigration enforcement as the reason the court couldn't take DOJ representations at face value. He wrote: 'The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.' The DOJ's conduct 'casts serious doubt as to the true purposes for which Plaintiff is seeking voter registration lists in this and other cases.'

In March 2026, the DOJ confirmed in federal court that it plans to share the voter data it collects with the Department of Homeland Security. The disclosure came during a hearing in the Rhode Island case. DOJ lawyers had previously assured a Minnesota court that the data wouldn't be used for immigration enforcement — then acknowledged in Rhode Island that it would be .

DHS uses a citizenship-verification system called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) to screen voter data. People flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens are referred to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit. The Texas Tribune documented in February 2026 that the SAVE tool as noncitizens due to outdated records. As the DOJ prepared the DHS transfer, the chief privacy officer for DOJ's Civil Rights Division .

On April 21, 2026, Common Cause and four individual voters filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the DOJ's national voter database as unconstitutional. The ACLU filed the suit on their behalf, arguing the administration is voter data to conduct its own state-by-state purge operation ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The complaint names the DOJ's effort as 'the first time in American history' a president has demanded confidential voter information from all 50 states and D.C. and is compiling it into a single federal record system. The Campaign Legal Center filed a parallel suit on behalf of the League of Women Voters challenging DHS's consolidation of Social Security Administration citizenship data into the SAVE system.

Marc Elias's Elias Law Group (ELG) has served as lead counsel for intervenor defendants — including voter advocacy groups and individual registrants — in most of the successfully dismissed cases. Elias founded Democracy Docket in 2020 as the primary litigation-tracking and communications platform for voting rights cases nationwide.

Elias Law Group's litigation strategy has focused on two prongs: statutory arguments that the invoked federal laws don't authorize the demanded disclosures, and constitutional arguments that the DOJ's true purpose is immigration enforcement rather than election-law compliance — which knocks out the good-faith deference courts normally extend to federal agencies. That two-track approach carried the Oregon ruling, produced the Kasubhai 'cannot be trusted' finding, and was cited as persuasive precedent in at least three subsequent dismissals.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson — a Republican and the state's chief elections official — publicly condemned the DOJ's lawsuit against Utah as federal overreach after it was filed in spring 2026. Her criticism put her among a bipartisan coalition of state election officials resisting the administration's demands. The DOJ sued five additional states in rapid succession — Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and New Jersey — even as courts continued dismissing earlier cases.

The University of Wisconsin Law School's State Democracy Research Initiative maintains a of all 31 DOJ voter data lawsuits with current case status. The Brennan Center for Justice separately tracks all 48-state-plus-D.C. data requests and has documented that the DOJ hasn't identified a single confirmed noncitizen voter as a result of the data it has already received.