Last December, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon promised that the Justice Department would win every one of its lawsuits to force states to hand over sensitive voter data, but nearly a year later, the department is 0-for-26, according to reporting.
Since September 2025, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for their voter rolls, which can include addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, but Dillon’s office has lost every case decided so far in district court, and several are still pending, wrote The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic.
Judges appointed by both parties have ruled against the administration, including several nominated by President Donald Trump. Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., went further than most, finding the entire nationwide effort unlawful.
The department has also lost on appeal. In June, the Sixth Circuit ruled against the government, but when the court declined to reconsider the case in August, Dhillon brushed it off on X: “Very powerful dissents!” Attorney General Todd Blanche floated taking the fight to the Supreme Court but hasn’t done so.
Judges found DOJ had no legal basis for its demands. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter wrote that the department’s arguments would let it “embark on a fishing expedition of voter records in any state,” and warned that DOJ appeared to be “on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database.”
The litigation has been riddled with errors. DOJ sent requests to the wrong officials, spent months emailing an incorrect address in Oklahoma, filed two cases in the wrong court and uploaded a filing with internal comments still in the PDF.
Red-state Republicans have also balked. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, called a DOJ letter that seemed to hint at prosecuting resistant officials “truly bizarre behavior.”
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former Civil Rights Division official, said the rulings could spell trouble in states that complied voluntarily. Under the judges’ reading of the Privacy Act, he said, it’s “very hard to read this analysis and not think that in other instances, where they did get the data, that somebody committed a federal misdemeanor.”
Levitt said DOJ’s losing streak “is a pretty clean rebuttal” to the idea that Trump can impose his will on elections.
“Step one, collect voter files. Step three, elections with integrity,” he said, summing up the administration’s reasoning. “What’s step two?”
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