Trump DOJ sued 24 states to seize unredacted voter files with SSNs

In May 2025, the Trump Justice Department sent letters to 44 states and 🏛️DC demanding full, unredacted voter registration files — including partial Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. The department claimed authority under the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Most states already provide a public version of voter rolls but redact sensitive identification numbers to protect voter privacy.

By September 2025, the DOJ began suing states that refused to comply. By early 2026, it had filed suit against 24 states plus the 🏛️District of Columbia.

Every jurisdiction sued was either led by Democrats or had cast its electoral votes against Trump in 2020. Four Republican-led states — 💎Arkansas, 🏎️Indiana, 🌻Kansas, and 🦬Wyoming — voluntarily handed over their voter data without being sued.

Assistant Attorney General HDHarmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ Civil Rights Division, directed the campaign. Dhillon was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025. She publicly framed the data demands as necessary to verify that voter rolls contain only eligible citizens, though critics noted no evidence of systemic fraud in any of the targeted states.

Federal District Judge David O

Carter dismissed the 🌴California lawsuit on January 15, 2026, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was not designed to give the executive branch unbridled consolidation of all elections power and that such a power grab was antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections

U.S District Judge MKMustafa Kasubhai dismissed the 🌲Oregon suit on January 27, 2026, finding the DOJ never met the legal standard to obtain the records A 🍑Georgia federal judge also dismissed that state voter-data lawsuit.

In December 2025, Stateline reported that the DOJ had quietly offered a confidential memorandum of understanding to more than a dozen Republican-led states. Under the MOU, states would give the federal government their voter rolls, receive a list of flagged voters from federal databases, and then purge those voters within 45 days. The NVRA own list-maintenance rules require states to give voters 90 days notice and a chance to respond before removal — meaning the 45-day MOU timeline may itself violate the law the DOJ claims to be enforcing.

The DOJ separately sued Fulton County, 🍑Georgia in December 2025, seeking all physical ballots, ballot images, and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election. On January 28, 2026, FBI agents executed a warrant at the Fulton County election office and seized the 2020 election materials, joined by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who launched a parallel investigation into 2020 ballots.

The DOJ legal strategy shifted during the campaign: early lawsuits cited both the NVRA and HAVA as legal authority; later suits dropped those statutory claims entirely and rested solely on the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allows the attorney general to inspect voter records relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting. Critics including the Brennan Center for Justice argued the 1960 Act was designed to combat Jim Crow-era voter discrimination by segregationist registrars, not to build a centralized federal voter database.

By February 2026, even some Republican election officials were resisting the DOJ demands. At least a half-dozen GOP-led state election offices declined to provide non-public voter data, citing their own states privacy laws. CNN reported that several Republican secretaries of state told the DOJ that handing over Social Security numbers would expose them to liability under state law — illustrating that the campaign had fractured along state-sovereignty lines rather than strictly partisan ones.