The administration of Donald Trump has suffered its 21st consecutive court defeat in attempts to obtain state voter rolls. This week, a federal judge again ruled that states are not obligated to transfer this data to the federal government. Ahead of the midterm elections on November 3, where Republicans are defending a narrow majority in both chambers of Congress, the administration is seeking to expand federal control over elections.
Trump claims that mass voting by non-U.S. citizens benefits the Democratic Party, although state audits and independent studies have shown such cases to be extremely rare. A Reuters investigation found that only 129 individuals have been held accountable for non-citizen voting since the relevant law was passed in 1996. Most of these cases involved voter confusion or misunderstandings with election officials, rather than organized conspiracies.
Judges have repeatedly emphasized, including this week, that the U.S. Constitution places primary responsibility for conducting federal elections on the states, and federal law does not require them to transfer these records to the government. “If the Department disagrees with Congress’s determination regarding the records necessary to carry out its statutorily assigned functions, it must take up those objections with Congress,” wrote U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, on Thursday, rejecting the Justice Department’s request for unredacted voter rolls from Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against more than two dozen states that refused to hand over voter rolls containing data such as birth dates and partial Social Security numbers. Simultaneously, the administration has threatened to suspend a portion of federal disaster relief funding to states that do not use the federal citizenship verification system for voters. It has also sought to limit mail-in voting. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dillon stated: “Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote is one of the government’s fundamental functions, and states are obligated to maintain the accuracy of voter rolls.”
Justice Department Appeals
All 21 of the Justice Department’s court losses since January have been handed down by federal judges appointed by presidents from both parties, including in states governed by both Democrats and Republicans. Meanwhile, the department could still secure victories in nine similar cases that remain pending. The department has already appealed 16 decisions. It has lost one of them: on June 24, a panel of judges from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against Michigan. The department could also turn to the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservative justices hold a 6:3 majority, although there is no guarantee it will agree to hear these cases.
The administration has also taken other measures that civil rights organizations and Democrats call coercive. In early July, Harmeet Dillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning of potential criminal liability if they knowingly keep non-citizens on voter rolls. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced it could suspend a portion of federal aid to states that do not verify voter rolls through the federal immigration database SAVE.
Separately, the Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to allow the implementation of a presidential order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote and restrict mail-in voting to voters included in these lists. A federal judge blocked this order in several states, noting that federal agencies cannot reliably compile such lists. The court has not yet issued a final ruling. Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation Don Palmer stated that this campaign reflects the administration’s efforts to identify non-citizens and provide relevant information to the states.
Court Criticizes ‘Baseless Search for Evidence’
Justice Department lawyers stated they plan to cross-reference state voter rolls with the SAVE database to identify registered voters who are not U.S. citizens. Democrats and voting rights organizations argue that the information in this database is not always reliable. In a June 27 ruling rejecting a request for Pennsylvania voter rolls, U.S. District Judge Kathy Bissoon, an appointee of Barack Obama, stated that the federal government is essentially conducting a “baseless search for evidence” to “advance unfounded claims about non-citizen voting.” The Justice Department has already appealed this decision.
Liz Frost, a lawyer at Elias Law Group, stated that the administration could use the inability to obtain voter rolls from several states as an argument to undermine confidence in the electoral system and lay the groundwork for a possible challenge to the midterm election results. “They will fabricate false stories about imaginary problems with voter rolls,” she said.
A Justice Department representative cited a July 17 Department of Homeland Security finding that over 250,000 potential non-citizens were registered to vote in four states. They also mentioned New Jersey data on 400 individuals who were not U.S. citizens and voted after being mistakenly registered in 2023–2024. However, the DHS did not report how many of these 250,000 individuals were actually non-citizens, how many of them voted, or how this estimate was obtained. In the 2024 presidential election in New Jersey, over 4 million people voted, and the state governor stated there is no evidence these cases affected the election results.
Source: The Straits Times
