By Luc Cohen
April 28 (Reuters) - As the U.S. midterm elections approach, Democrats are winning legal challenges to the Trump administration's push to obtain states' voter rolls, dealing a blow to the president's unprecedented effort to expand the federal government's role in elections.
The Democratic-run states' victories come as their party is locked in a fierce battle to take back both houses of Congress from President Donald Trump's Republicans in the November 3 midterms.
So far this year, federal
judges in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island have dismissed Justice Department lawsuits demanding those states' voter rolls, including sensitive information like partial Social Security numbers.
Litigation surrounding U.S. federal elections has become common, with Democrats and aligned voting rights groups generally challenging state laws they believe restrict the right to vote and Republicans and their allies challenging state voting practices they say leave elections vulnerable to fraud. Trump asserts, falsely, that his 2020 election loss was due to fraud.
But the Justice Department's efforts to obtain states' voter rolls highlight a new dynamic this election cycle: voting rights groups are increasingly finding themselves in court fighting against the federal government.
"This year, we have the added layer of the Department of Justice being perhaps the main player in voter suppression litigation," said Lis Frost, a lawyer with Elias Law Group, which has intervened in the voter data demand lawsuits on behalf of voting rights groups. "This DOJ has taken on the mantle that was previously carried by right-wing organizations to try to argue that there are voters on the rolls that shouldn't be there and to try to remove voters from the rolls."
Frost's firm was founded by prominent election lawyer Marc Elias, an outspoken Trump critic. The firm frequently represents the Democratic party and its candidates in court.
Four of the judges who dismissed the suits - three of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents and one of whom was appointed by Trump during his first term - found that the federal government did not articulate why it needed the unredacted data to carry out oversight of state voting practices. The fifth judge, Trump appointee Hala Jarbou of Michigan, said the Justice Department adequately explained the basis of its request but that the laws it cited did not require the state to hand over the rolls.
The U.S. Constitution assigns individual states the role of administering federal elections.
To be sure, the Trump administration could still prevail: it is appealing three of its losses, and 25 similar cases are pending. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, has said she is prepared to take the cases to the Supreme Court, where conservative justices hold a 6-3 majority.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, "President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters."
TRUMP CALLS FOR 'NATIONALIZING' ELECTIONS
Since last year, the Justice Department has sent letters to nearly every state seeking their voter rolls, and asking for details about their procedures for removing ineligible individuals like deceased people, convicted felons and non-citizens. Seventeen states handed over their rolls voluntarily, Justice Department lawyers have said. The department sued dozens of states, including several led by Republicans, that did not comply.
In an interview with Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" program on April 19, Dhillon said that the department had reviewed 60 million voter records so far and found the names of 350,000 dead persons and 25,000 people who lacked proof of citizenship.
Dhillon did not provide evidence that votes were cast for those names.
Trump and his allies have long asserted states are not doing enough to prevent voter fraud, even though state audits and academic studies have found it is rare.
Critics say Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an effort to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic‑leaning voters.
Trump in February said in a podcast interview that Republicans should "nationalize" and "take over" voting, without giving details of what he intended.
Legal experts say the steps his administration has taken in that direction are unlikely to survive challenges in the courts.
In addition to the losses over state voter rolls, three federal judges in separate cases have blocked Trump's 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting the counting of mail ballots. The Justice Department is appealing. A March 2026 executive order restricting mail-in voting has also drawn legal challenges.
"He doesn't have the levers, he doesn't have the switch, there is nobody he can order to federalize the elections who will listen to him," said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department elections lawyer and current professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
But even if the Justice Department continues to lose in court, some legal experts said they expected Trump to point to the legal battles to try to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the midterms should Republicans lose. That would echo a playbook that Trump deployed after his 2020 loss, when he used more than 60 defeats in legal challenges to the election results to rally his base and undercut faith in the reliability of the vote.
"This is using the legal process, the law enforcement process to serve a propaganda role, to lead to destabilization and delegitimization of future elections like in 2026," said David Becker, a former Justice Department election lawyer and now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a non-partisan group that promotes voter participation and election security.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Trump's claims have gained broad traction with the American public, with 46% of respondents, including 82% of Republicans, agreeing with the statement that large numbers of fraudulent ballots are cast by non-citizens.
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CITES CIVIL RIGHTS LAW
In suing states to demand their voter rolls, the department has cited the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The law, passed to combat racial discrimination at a time when Southern states were destroying Black Americans' voter registration records to cover up disenfranchisement, requires states to preserve such records.
But the judge who dismissed the lawsuit against California said the Justice Department's request for the most populous U.S. state's voter roll went beyond what Congress intended when it passed the Civil Rights Act and other voting laws.
The judge, David Carter, said the fact that the department had requested the data of so many states suggested that the federal government was seeking to build a nationwide database of voter information, rather than investigate alleged mismanagement by individual states.
"The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data," Carter wrote in a January 15 decision.
The Santa Ana, California-based judge said the Constitution requires that policy changes that could erode privacy and voting rights must be decided by Congress.
"It cannot be the product of an executive fiat," Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote.
The prospect of a nationwide voter database has alarmed voting rights activists, who are concerned that the government is seeking to compare voter rolls with other sources of data to purge people it believes are not citizens.
But those other sources may not have up-to-date information on whether previously ineligible immigrants have since become naturalized citizens, said Renata O'Donnell, senior litigation counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that works to expand voting access.
"People who should lawfully be able to access the franchise are going to be disenfranchised," said O'Donnell, whose organization is representing voting rights groups that have intervened in several voter roll cases.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)
