A federal judge dismissed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit demanding Massachusetts’ unredacted voter registration rolls Thursday, marking the fourth loss for the agency, with zero wins, out of 30 active cases.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, the DOJ demanded unfettered access to every state’s voter registration records as part of the administration’s obsessive focus on immigration enforcement. While 17 Republican-led states have complied, the rest have refused, leading the DOJ to sue 29 states and Washington, D.C. for their voter rolls.
But when the DOJ demanded Massachusetts’ voter data, which includes sensitive information like social security numbers and dates of birth, it failed to explain why as required by the 1960 Civil Rights Act (CRA), District Court Judge Leo Sorokin noted in his opinion.*
“The United States’ complaint fails for the simple reason that the Attorney General’s demand did not comply with Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the statute on which it purports to rely,” Sorokin wrote. “Here, the Attorney General offered no basis—none—and the demand was therefore facially inadequate.”
Under the CRA, the DOJ can request copies of state voter records to ensure compliance with federal laws, provided that the agency also provides a “basis” and “purpose” for the demand. In state after state, the DOJ failed to explicitly do that, leading to their losses in California and Oregon. A Trump-appointed judge in Michigan also ruled against the DOJ’s demands on separate legal grounds. Sorokin cited all of those cases in his ruling.
The DOJ also had its lawsuit in Georgia dismissed without prejudice because it was filed in the wrong court. The DOJ subsequently refiled.
“The requirement that the Attorney General state ‘the basis’ for her request is mandatory, not a mere formality with which the federal government or this Court is free to dispense,” wrote Sorokin, who was appointed by Barack Obama. “Unlike the Justice Department’s demand letters directed at some other jurisdictions, neither the July 22 letter nor the August 14 letter “pointed to [any] purported anomalies within [Massachusetts’s] voter registration data.”
Maya Bodinson contributed to this report.
*Intervenor defendants in this lawsuit are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias is ELG chairman.
