A federal judge threw out the Trump Justice Department’s lawsuit demanding Georgia voters’ Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the case in an order filed on Wednesday. She granted Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s motion to dismiss and denied the DOJ’s motion to compel him to hand over the records.
The fight began in July 2025, when the DOJ asked Raffensperger’s office for Georgia’s full, unredacted voter registration list. According to the order, federal officials said they wanted to run it through the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database, which checks citizenship status. Follow-up letters in August demanded that every field be visible, including dates of birth and Social Security numbers.
In December, the DOJ sent a draft agreement requiring Georgia to transfer the data to a DOJ contractor. Raffensperger’s office instead sent a version of the list with dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers removed, citing a state law that keeps that information confidential. The DOJ sued under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, arguing the federal law overrides Georgia’s privacy protections. Its lawsuit sought the voters’ last four Social Security digits along with other identifying details.
Calvert disagreed.
“Based on the text of the CRA, including what was cited above, there is no explicit manifestation of Congress’s intent to preempt states’ voter privacy laws,” she wrote. “Indeed, the CRA does not refer to state laws at all.”
The judge also rejected the DOJ’s claim that it could not police voter roll maintenance without voters’ identifying numbers. She pointed to the list maintenance records Georgia had already provided.
“Defendant Raffensperger’s efforts demonstrate that it is possible to comply with both Georgia’s voter privacy law and federal laws related to voter records,” Calvert wrote.
Georgia law does let some federal agencies receive confidential voter data if they keep it confidential and use it only to identify voters, the order noted. However, Calvert found that exception did not apply because the DOJ would not make that commitment. In a footnote, she wrote that the department “has not agreed that the information would remain confidential.”
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