DOJ Sues Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada Over Voter Data

Beginning in December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed lawsuits against states that refused to turn over complete, unredacted voter registration rolls, and the DOJ lawsuits against states over voter data eventually reached 30 states and the District of Columbia. The department demanded driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, and party affiliation. Federal courts have mostly sided with the states, dismissing eight cases outright and producing the first appellate ruling against the DOJ in June 2026.

What the DOJ Asked For

The campaign started in May 2025 with letters from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Civil Rights Division, asking state election officials for their full voter registration lists.¹ The requests went well beyond the names and addresses that are publicly available in most states. They sought dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and party affiliation.²

The DOJ cited three statutes as its legal basis: Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which gives the Attorney General authority to obtain state records related to voting; the National Voter Registration Act of 1993; and the Help America Vote Act. The department argued that the Civil Rights Act functioned as an investigatory tool and did not require it to show a specific violation before demanding records. Critics noted that in the entire history of those statutes, the DOJ had never before requested complete unredacted statewide voter rolls.¹

A March 2025 executive order from President Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue election-integrity information and authorized DHS to cross-reference voter data against federal immigration databases.³ The administration framed the effort as needed to prevent noncitizen voting.

The December 2025 Lawsuits Against Four States

On December 11, 2025, the DOJ sued Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Each state had provided publicly available voter information but refused to hand over the sensitive identifiers.

Colorado

Secretary of State Jena Griswold had provided publicly available data in response to the May 2025 request. When the Civil Rights Division followed up in December asking for an agreement to share unredacted data, she declined the next day. The lawsuit followed nine days later. “We will not hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump,” Griswold said. “He does not have a legal right to the information.”⁴ Colorado also rejected a proposed confidential memorandum of understanding that would have required states to “clean” their rolls within 45 days based on federal review.⁵ As of mid-2026, the case remained pending.¹

Hawaii

Dhillon sent her initial request to Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago on September 8, 2025. Hawaii’s Deputy Solicitor General Thomas Hughes replied on September 22 that most of the information was confidential under state law and that the cited federal statutes did not appear to require the state to produce it.⁶ After the DOJ sued in Honolulu federal court, the NAACP California-Hawaii State Conference was permitted to intervene as a defendant. In April 2026 the court stayed the case pending Ninth Circuit decisions in the related California and Oregon appeals.⁷

Massachusetts

Massachusetts produced the DOJ’s most significant courtroom defeat. Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin refused the July 2025 request, and the resulting case, United States v. Galvin, drew intervention from the ACLU, Common Cause, Jane Doe Inc., and a naturalized citizen voter.⁸

On April 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin dismissed the lawsuit, calling the DOJ’s demand letter “facially inadequate” under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. It failed to cite the statute, provided no factual basis for the demand, and did not identify any concern about Massachusetts’ compliance with federal voting laws.⁹ The Attorney General, Sorokin wrote, “offered no basis — none” for the demand.¹⁰ Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the ruling “a decisive win for voters and the rule of law.” The DOJ filed a notice of appeal to the First Circuit on June 1, 2026.¹¹

Nevada

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar withheld driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, calling the DOJ’s requests “sweeping demands” designed to “intimidate states and influence how states administer elections ahead of the 2026 cycle.”¹² Aguilar said he had repeatedly asked how the DOJ would secure the data and received no answers.¹³ In January 2026, the state moved to dismiss, arguing that the Civil Rights Act was designed to fight discriminatory practices like poll taxes, not to enable mass data collection, that the DOJ offered no valid basis for an investigation, and that compliance would violate federal and state privacy laws.¹⁴ The case remained pending in mid-2026.¹

Which States Complied and Which Resisted

By April 2026, the DOJ had sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., and had demanded voter information from at least 47 states in total.¹¹⁵ The vast majority of states sued had voted against President Trump in 2020.¹⁶

At least 12 states voluntarily provided voter data, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.¹⁷ Alaska and Texas signed the DOJ’s confidential memorandum of understanding; Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee turned over data but refused to sign.¹⁸ Resistance was not strictly partisan: at least six states with Republican chief election officials declined, and Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said he would not release unredacted lists without a court order.¹⁹

How the Courts Have Ruled

By mid-2026, federal district courts had dismissed the voter data lawsuits in eight states: Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. Oklahoma settled by agreeing to provide the data in exchange for dismissal.¹¹

The rulings shared a consistent logic. Judges in California and Oregon found the DOJ failed to establish any valid basis for its demand, with one court warning that the DOJ’s reading would give the federal government “unlimited authority over state elections.” In Michigan, the court ruled that voter rolls, compiled from information provided by voters themselves, do not constitute records that “come into the possession” of election officials within the meaning of the Civil Rights Act.¹⁵ The California judge raised concerns about “federal overreach” and the administration’s lack of transparency about how the data would be used.¹⁹

Facing a pattern of defeats, Dhillon filed nearly identical notices in April 2026 in 13 states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, asking court permission to send “curing elaboration letters” to fix the missing legal basis in the original demands. As of late April, no court had agreed. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey opposed the move, arguing the court should not “permit the United States to graft it onto existing litigation to rescue their current, legally deficient demand.”¹⁰

On June 24, 2026, the Sixth Circuit issued the first appellate ruling, upholding Michigan’s dismissal and holding that the Civil Rights Act does not grant the DOJ authority to compel production of aggregated, internally maintained voter files.²⁰ The Ninth Circuit heard consolidated arguments in the California and Oregon appeals on May 19, 2026, and had not yet ruled. The First Circuit (Massachusetts) and Seventh Circuit (Wisconsin) appeals were at the initial filing stage.¹¹

What the DOJ Planned to Do With the Data

At a March 2026 hearing in the Rhode Island case, the DOJ’s Acting Voting Section Chief Eric Neff confirmed the department planned to run collected voter rolls against the SAVE program, the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, to check citizenship status.⁹

The administration had repurposed SAVE for bulk searches of voter rolls, and its accuracy quickly became a flashpoint. DHS ran 49.5 million voter files through the system and identified roughly 10,000 registrants, about 0.02%, as potential noncitizens. In multiple states, many of those flagged were in fact citizens. In Boone County, Missouri, more than half of the voters flagged were verified as U.S. citizens; in St. Louis County, roughly 35% of those identified as potential noncitizens were naturalized citizens.²¹ In Denton County, Texas, at least 14% of those flagged were confirmed as citizens on further review, and in Travis County, officials investigating 97 flagged individuals confirmed at least 11 as citizens.²² At least one Texas citizen had their voter registration revoked without their knowledge.²³

USCIS acknowledged providing incorrect information to at least five states.²¹²² On June 22, 2026, a federal judge issued a 75-page ruling blocking the administration’s 2025 overhaul of SAVE, finding that federal officials “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”²³

Privacy Risks Driving State Resistance

Election security experts described the combination the DOJ was seeking, driver’s license numbers paired with partial Social Security numbers and dates of birth, as the “holy trinity of identity theft.”⁵

States resisting the requests cited their own privacy statutes, many of which explicitly prohibit disclosing Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers from voter files, along with federal protections including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1993.¹ Several federal judges flagged risks in centralizing this data within the executive branch without congressional approval. A DOJ court filing in a separate matter acknowledged that “rogue” Department of Government Efficiency employees may have unlawfully shared Social Security Administration data with True the Vote, an outside advocacy group.²⁴ In April 2026, Common Cause and several individual voters filed their own lawsuit against the DOJ to block the creation of a national voter database and to prevent running the data through SAVE.¹⁸

The Parallel Executive Order Fight

In March 2026, the administration issued Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” It directed USCIS and the Social Security Administration to compile “Confirmed Citizen Lists” for each state, with transmission infrastructure due by September 2026, ahead of the November midterms. It also directed the Postmaster General to begin rulemaking on mail-in ballot integrity and instructed the Attorney General to prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local officials who issue ballots to ineligible individuals.²⁵

Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. sued, arguing the order exceeded presidential authority, violated the separation of powers, and commandeered state election machinery under the Tenth Amendment. In June 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts denied the administration’s motion to dismiss, finding the states had standing based on the threat of criminal prosecution against their officials and mandatory compliance costs. Massachusetts alone estimated roughly $3 million for mail ballot envelopes. Twelve Republican-led states intervened on the administration’s side.²⁵

Where Things Stand

As of late June 2026, the voter data lawsuits against Colorado, Hawaii, and Nevada remained pending in federal district courts, with the Hawaii case stayed to await the Ninth Circuit. Massachusetts had been dismissed and was on appeal to the First Circuit. The Sixth Circuit had affirmed Michigan’s dismissal in the first appellate ruling on the merits, and the Ninth Circuit’s decisions in California and Oregon were still awaited and expected to shape outcomes in several other states.²⁰⁷

1
NCSL. Federal Requests for Statewide Voter Lists
2
WGBH News. Justice Department Sues Mass., 17 Other States for Access to Detailed Voter Data
3
The White House. Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections
4
Colorado Secretary of State. Press Release on DOJ Lawsuit
5
Stateline. Trump’s DOJ Offers States Confidential Deal to Wipe Voters Flagged by Feds as Ineligible
6
Honolulu Civil Beat. Federal DOJ Sues Hawaiʻi for Refusing to Provide Voter Data
7
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. United States v. Nago
8
ACLU of Massachusetts. Federal Court Dismisses Trump Administration’s Lawsuit to Obtain Private Voter Data From Massachusetts
9
The Well News. A Federal Judge Dismisses DOJ Lawsuit Seeking Voter Data in Massachusetts
10
Democracy Docket. DOJ Wants Do-Over for Legally Deficient Demand for State Voter Rolls
11
State Democracy Research Initiative. Tracker: DOJ Lawsuits Seeking States’ Sensitive Voter Data
12
Nevada Secretary of State. Secretary of State Response to DOJ Lawsuit
13
The Nevada Independent. Feds Sue Nevada for Not Sharing Voters’ Driver’s License, Partial Social Security Numbers
14
Las Vegas Sun. Nevada Asks Court to Drop DOJ Case Demanding State Voter Data
15
Brennan Center for Justice. Federal Courts Reject Trump Administration’s Attempts to Obtain Private Voter Data
16
OPB. Trump’s DOJ Has Sued 18 States to Try to Access Voter Data
17
Protect Democracy. Voting Rights: DOJ National Voter Database
18
Brennan Center for Justice. Tracker: Justice Department Requests for Voter Information
19
NCSL. Feds Show New Level of Interest in Voter List Data
20
CNN. Appeals Court Rejects Demand for Confidential Voter Roll Data
21
Brennan Center for Justice. Watch Out for False Voter Fraud Claims Fueled by the SAVE Program
22
Texas Tribune. SAVE Voter Citizenship Tool: Mistakes and Confusion
23
Votebeat. Judge Rules Against Trump Overhaul of SAVE Database for Noncitizen Voters
24
U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell. Cantwell Tells DOJ to Cease Pressure Campaign to Obtain States’ Sensitive Voter Data, Purge Voter Rolls
25
Democracy Docket. Order on Motion to Dismiss, States v. Trump