The Trump administration on Thursday sued five states for voter data, including three governed by Republicans, some of the first red states to be targeted in an escalating effort to seize the personal and private information of voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
The Justice Department lawsuits targeted the Republican-led states of Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia, in addition to Kentucky and New Jersey. It had already sued 24 states, most of them led by Democrats.
The suits filed on Thursday did not directly mention the Trump administration’s broader allegations of what it calls voter fraud, which the government has used elsewhere to justify efforts to seize ballots and other voting records. Mr. Trump has also recently pushed legislation to address his debunked claims of widespread election fraud, and his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
In 2024, Republicans won every statewide race, every House seat and supermajorities in the state legislatures in Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia. Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, has a single Democratic congressman: Representative Morgan McGarvey. The top elections officials in Utah, West Virginia and Kentucky are Republicans. The top elections official in Oklahoma is elected to two-year terms by the Republican-dominated state senate.
The offices of Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia did not respond to requests for comment.
Sarah Corley, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, did not directly comment on the lawsuit, writing in a statement that “Oklahoma has led the nation in secure and transparent elections and strict voter I.D. laws” and referred questions about the suit to the state’s election agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.
New Jersey is largely governed by Democrats. Representatives of Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Lt. Gov. Dale G. Caldwell, the top elections official in the state, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department has asked nearly every state for their complete, unredacted voter rolls in a quest to essentially establish a national voting database before the midterms. Mr. Trump has called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections, though the Constitution leaves their administration to the states.
So far, roughly 11 Republican-governed states have complied with the requests for voter data, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, while the states with Republican leadership targeted by the Justice Department lawsuits on Thursday have not.
The Justice Department has now sued 29 states and the District of Columbia as part of its effort to seize voter data. Federal judges have dismissed those lawsuits in three early cases — California, Michigan and Oregon — in rulings that rebuked the Trump administration. Two of the judges issued explicit warnings that, in their view, the Trump administration could not be trusted and that its efforts to centralize the electoral process posed a serious risk.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump has claimed without evidence that elections in the United States are “rigged,” beginning with his debunked claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, depriving him of a symbolic win in the popular vote even as he won the vote in the electoral college. Those false claims culminated in an effort to subvert his loss in the 2020 election.
In the years since, Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, and he has repeatedly amplified that claim since returning to office last year. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that his second term, which ends in 2029, “should be my third term,” falsely asserting that he had beaten his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly returned to the specter of noncitizen voting to justify his false claims and his push to limit voting rights, even though a preliminary analysis of immigrant voting commissioned by the Trump administration provided no evidence of widespread or even significant voter fraud. And he has shown an increased eagerness to leverage the full investigative, prosecutorial and legislative powers of the federal government to bend election mechanics to his will.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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