A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected an effort by the Department of Justice to force Michigan to turn over its voter rolls, including sensitive voter information — the most significant rebuke yet by courts of the federal government’s effort to obtain private data.
The decision deals a major blow to the Justice Department’s efforts to obtain such information from every state as it seeks to compile the largest set of national voter roll data ever collected.
That effort is part of an administration-wide push by President Trump and his allies to find evidence of voter fraud. So far, they have not found anything substantial, and critics say the effort is yet another attempt by the president to sow distrust in elections and erect new barriers to voting.
Since the department began demanding voter rolls last year, more than half of all states have refused to comply. The department has since sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., to try to force them to hand over the data.
That has not been successful. The Justice Department has lost nine of the lawsuits so far in federal court, including one in Maryland last Thursday, and has won none of them. Wednesday’s decision marked the first time an appeals court had weighed in, setting the stage for a potential escalation to the Supreme Court.
In its decision on Wednesday, a panel of appellate judges took issue with the government’s use of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to justify the demand for voter data. The judges found that the law did not require states to turn over any material, and took issue with the government’s description of the creation of state voter lists.
Additionally, the court noted that the federal government was using a law intended to protect the right to vote for “an inverse purpose — to ensure that some people have not voted.”
The panel ruled, 2-1, against the government, with Judge Andre Mathis writing the majority opinion. Judge Mathis, who was appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was joined by Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton. Judge John B. Nalbandian, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in his first term, dissented, arguing that the Civil Rights Act did, in fact, give the government the right to demand the voter files.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The decision comes as President Trump has renewed his push to pass new federal legislation that would impose fresh voting restrictions, such as requiring those seeking to register to vote to provide proof of citizenship first. The president on Thursday canceled the signing of a celebrated bipartisan housing measure, demanding that Republicans pass the SAVE America Act first.
The ruling from the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower-court decision in February in which Judge Hala Y. Jarbou, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term, rejected the administration’s argument that it was entitled to know Michigan voters’ personal information to “prevent the inclusion of ineligible voters” and to combat what it called “voter fraud.”
Judge Jarbou found that neither the Help America Vote Act nor the National Voter Registration Act required disclosure of the records, and that the text of the Civil Rights Act did not apply to “a statewide computerized voter list.”
Across the country, the Justice Department has been running into significant headwinds — and stern rebukes — regarding its effort to force states to turn over unredacted voter rolls. The rejections have come from judges appointed by presidents of both parties, and five of the nine federal judges who have rejected the Justice Department’s efforts were appointed by Mr. Trump.
On Thursday In Maryland, Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed by Mr. Trump during his first term, wrote that “this Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that” a private, unredacted state voter list “is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States” under the Civil Rights Act.
Some of the rulings have been more sweeping. In February, Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai, a Biden appointee, wrote that public statements and actions by the Justice Department forfeited the trust courts had traditionally granted to federal law enforcement.
The presumption that the department “could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds,” Judge Kasubhai wrote. He added that when the department claimed “that any private and sensitive data will remain private and used only for a declared and limited purpose, it must be thoroughly scrutinized and squared with its open and public statements to the contrary.”
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