The Trump administration's legal campaign to seize control of state voter registration lists has encountered a solid wall of judicial opposition, with federal courts unanimously rejecting the Justice Department's assertions of authority. To date, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has lost all 16 federal court decisions regarding its demands for unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive personal data, including home addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and Social Security numbers. State and local officials have fiercely resisted these demands, warning that turning over such detailed files would effectively create a sweeping federal surveillance tool.
The opposition is not split along partisan lines. Republican officials in states such as Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, and West Virginia have actively fought the requests alongside Democrats. Furthermore, of the 15 U.S. District Court judges who have ruled against the administration, seven were appointed by President Donald Trump himself. In total, nine of the 15 judges were appointed by Republicans. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has also rejected the department's demands as unlawful.
At the center of the nationwide litigation is whether the federal government has the authority to police state voter lists and potentially build a national database as part of Trump's initiative to prevent noncitizens from voting. Judges have repeatedly affirmed that the U.S. Constitution leaves the administration of elections to individual states, not the federal government. Many states argue that this unprecedented federal intervention is an attempt to solve a problem that is virtually non-existent. While Trump continued to complain about election security and noncitizen voting during a White House speech on July 16, election experts, judges, and Republican state officials maintain that allegations of widespread noncitizen voting are inaccurate and do not represent a systemic issue.
The legal battle has taken on a sense of urgency as the November 3 congressional midterms draw near. Under a 1993 federal law, broadly purging voter rolls is prohibited within the 90 days preceding an election, making August 5 the final deadline for such actions. Recognizing the tight timeline, two federal appeals courts have agreed to fast-track their reviews of the lower court rulings.
Despite the setbacks, the administration remains defiant. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the litigation as head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, defended the federal effort. "The Justice Department is committed to ensuring that our elections are accurate, fair, and secure, and that starts with clean, up-to-date voter rolls," Dhillon said. "We are confident in the legal basis for these cases and will continue to pursue them vigorously, including on appeal."
The push began in earnest in March 2025, when Trump signed an executive order directing the DOJ to prioritize preventing noncitizens from voting, declaring it his "unavoidable duty" to secure elections. Dhillon subsequently began demanding state voter rolls to cross-reference names for citizenship status and other inaccuracies, such as deceased individuals or those who have relocated. She cited the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to justify demanding personal identifying information, alongside the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. "Federal law requires states to make reasonable efforts to maintain accurate registration lists, and where states fall short, this Department will act to enforce that obligation," Dhillon stated.
The federal strategy involves checking state lists against the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. However, a federal judge has blocked this action, ruling that the SAVE database is "inaccurate" and "unreliable" for verifying voter eligibility. Election experts point out that the 1974 Privacy Act was specifically enacted to prevent the federal government from sharing personal voter information in this manner.
"The Department of Justice has no power – none – to purge the voter rolls," said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former DOJ official under the Obama and Biden administrations. "The courts aren’t buying what the Department of Justice is selling." Levitt added that the narrative of mass noncitizen voting is "fiction," noting that registering illegally leaves a clear trail of criminal behavior that is easily discovered.
While 23 mostly Republican-led states complied with the federal requests, many others refused, citing state privacy laws and the lack of federal jurisdiction. This prompted the DOJ to sue 30 states and the District of Columbia for unredacted voter lists. In one of the earliest rulings on January 15, U.S. District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles described the government's demands as "unprecedented and illegal," adding that "it is not for the Executive, or even this Court to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans. That power belongs solely to Congress."
David Becker, a former senior trial attorney for the DOJ Civil Rights Division's voting section, expressed astonishment at the administration's legal record. "As a former DOJ attorney, the idea of going 0-15 in cases – you can’t even wrap your head around it," Becker said. "It’s just remarkable."
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15, emphasized that most cases are still under appeal and asserted that some judges have agreed with certain department arguments. For instance, on July 7, U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell in Florida ruled that four Republican-led states could use the SAVE database to check voter citizenship. This decision directly conflicted with a June 22 ruling by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., who halted the database's use, labeling it "unreliable."
Republican election officials have been vocal in their resistance. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams warned that the federal demand would transform a "little-used provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960" into a "sweeping surveillance tool." Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson called the DOJ's demands "unlawful." West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner stated that while he supports clean voter rolls, transferring sensitive data would violate state law, pointing out that the presiding judge found "no indication" that West Virginia had failed to maintain its lists.
The litigation has also raised concerns regarding data security. In a January 16 court filing, the DOJ acknowledged that members of a Trump advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), obtained access to Social Security Administration data in March 2025, contradicting prior denials. The filing revealed that an unnamed political advocacy group had asked two DOGE members to analyze state voter rolls to identify "voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." In response to these revelations, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane refused to comply, writing: "While I appreciate the Department’s representations that Idaho’s data will be safeguarded, I cannot take that now-apparent risk in the absence of clear legal duty to do so."
Federal prosecutors have highlighted a few individual criminal cases to justify their concerns. These include two Pakistani men in New Jersey charged with registering and voting in 2020, an Australian permanent resident in Louisiana charged with illegal voting in 2022 and 2024, and a Chinese student at the University of Michigan who registered and voted in 2024 before fleeing the country. U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon in Michigan called illegal voting "a serious crime that cast doubt on our elections and serves to disenfranchise United States citizens."
Following Trump's speech on July 16, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that over 250,000 noncitizens were illegally registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, though it provided no supporting documentation. On July 17, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to those four states urging them to run their rolls through the SAVE database, threatening local officials with criminal penalties. "If the election officials, once we gave them the information that they need to secure their elections and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time," Mullin warned.
Earlier in July, Dhillon sent warning letters to all 50 states threatening criminal investigations if noncitizens vote in the 2026 election, and announced in a July 8 video that federal monitors would be deployed to Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Utah's Lt. Gov. Henderson criticized the moves on social media on July 7, calling the threats "truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights."
States have countered the federal narrative by highlighting their existing, rigorous maintenance procedures and the actual rarity of noncitizen registration. In Utah, a yearlong audit released in May identified and removed just 27 noncitizens from a pool of more than 2 million registered voters. The audit found that only eight noncitizens voted in 2020, and four each in 2018 and 2024. Idaho verified 1.1 million registered voters ahead of the 2024 election, referring 34 individuals for investigation, though none had voted in that year's elections; another 15 cases were referred to federal prosecutors in August 2025.
Texas has conducted routine county audits since 2021. Following the 2022 election, an audit of Harris County—home to Houston and 2.6 million voters—resulted in the removal of 1,136 noncitizens. A post-2024 audit of Val Verde County, a border community with 30,000 voters, uncovered only one noncitizen, who was subsequently removed. In Louisiana, Secretary of State Nancy Landry announced in September that a historical check of voter records dating back to the 1980s against the SAVE database flagged 390 registered noncitizens, of whom 79 had voted in at least one election. The state has 2.9 million registered voters. "I want to be clear: noncitizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana," Landry, a Republican, concluded.
