A federal judge in Michigan agreed to dismiss a Justice Department lawsuit seeking the state’s voter registration list. It’s the fourth such lawsuit to be thrown out among the nearly two dozen that the department has filed over the past year. With the courts repeatedly rejecting the legal grounds under which the Trump administration is trying to collect states’ voter rolls, a major question remains: What the heck is Attorney General Pam Bondi trying to do with this information?
Since last May, the Justice Department has firmly requested that states — and the District of Columbia — turn over a broad swath of election documents. Among those documents include the full voter rolls that states compile, which often contain personally identifiable identification, such as Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers, alongside party registration and complete voter history. Some officials have agreed to hand over the requested documents, mostly in GOP-led states, but many others have been deeply skeptical, given states’ constitutional role as election administrators.
In other words, it’s impossible now to trust that the Justice Department is being honest about its intentions with this data.
The reasoning behind the department’s unprecedented demand has been vague at best. In statements accompanying the lawsuits, Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, have stressed that it’s their duty to ensure states have accurate voter lists to ensure confidence in America’s elections. When states have offered to supply redacted versions of these lists to protect their citizens’ privacy, the Justice Department has rejected them as being incomplete and filed civil suits for failing to comply.
In their various lawsuits demanding compliance, the Justice Department is relying on three statutes: the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The first two are laws Congress passed to help make it easier to register to vote, including allowing for people to register while applying for a driver’s license or state ID, and requiring states to keep accurate voter lists. The third allows the attorney general to request documents that came into a state’s possession “relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.”
In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou rejected the government’s attempted use of all three statues, finding that none of them apply to the records requested. Her reasoning for rejecting the claim that HAVA requires states to make the totality of information in their voting registry public is particularly sound:
Requiring the submission of this information, which is used for ‘verification’ of a person’s identity … would serve little purpose if the very act of submitting this information made it public. The provision of personal information can establish someone’s identity because that information is only possessed by that individual; if everyone has access to the information, it can no longer be used to verify that a person is who they claim to be.
Jarbou’s ruling follows a much more scathing rebuke from her counterpart in Oregon, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai, earlier this month. In dismissing a similar suit, he wrote that the “presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to [the Justice Department] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.”
In other words, it’s impossible now to trust that the Justice Department is being honest about its intentions with this data.
This leads to the biggest takeaway for me in this legal drama: The Justice Department’s request is deeply weird. That may not sound particularly sophisticated, but it’s fitting given the lack of clarity on what the department even plans to do with this information. There has been plenty of speculation about Bondi’s aims but little surety, even among the state officials charged with administering elections.
The New York Times reported last year that the Trump administration is working to create “the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected,” in part to support President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Stateline, a nonprofit newsroom, also reported last year that the Justice Department was sharing the data it has obtained with the Department of Homeland Security to be “screened for ineligible voter entries.”
But there’s extremely little evidence that noncitizens are registering to vote en masse, let alone that this kind of effort is needed to track them down. It’s easy to get into the mindset that there’s some kind of 5D chess at work, positioning states’ reluctance as (flimsy and bad-faith) proof that there are secretly millions of alien voters on their rolls. But if painting the noncompliant states as suspect is the goal, going to court seems like the exact wrong way to go about it. If painting the noncompliant states as suspect is the goal, going to court seems like the exact wrong way to go about it. Filing these cases required the litigants to detail their exact reasoning for requesting the voter rolls and the legal justification for obtaining them. Much as with the lawsuits filed after the 2020 election, a slew of judges dismissing the Justice Department’s arguments before a trial was even necessary only hamstrings future efforts to pretend that there’s something nefarious at play before, during or after Election Day. The most troubling possibility is that the voter rolls will be fed into an algorithm to cross-reference Social Security numbers and other personal information with party affiliation. Trump has not been shy about wanting to punish Democratic-led states for their defiance. A centralized database of citizens’ political affiliations would make it easier to withhold federal aid from individuals in a truly dystopian way. Without further insight, we must rely on the fact that there has been no legitimate reason given to acquire this information. And in the absence of a legitimate reason to obtain state voter rolls, it logically follows that the reason is an illegitimate one. As things stand then, federal courts are right to reject the attorney general’s demands and leave sensitive data out of Bondi’s hands.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
