Justice Department backs Trump demand for unredacted voter rolls

The Justice Department has moved to keep pressing states for unredacted voter rolls even after federal judges in six states refused to force compliance, escalating a fight that now cuts to the core of who controls election administration.

A legal opinion issued May 12 by the Office of Legal Counsel said the department’s Civil Rights Division has authority to seek statewide voter lists and share them with the Department of Homeland Security, including Homeland Security Investigations. The memo said President Donald Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to prioritize enforcement of laws against noncitizen voting and to act against states that fail to meet list-maintenance requirements under the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

The dispute is about more than basic voter-registration files. The Justice Department wants the full statewide rolls, including sensitive data such as partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers, while states have argued that the federal government has no right to compel disclosure of information that carries obvious privacy risks. The opinion is not binding on states, but it gives federal lawyers a framework to continue a campaign judges have already rejected in several jurisdictions.

The legal pressure has spread rapidly. The Brennan Center for Justice says the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., over voter information demands, and that at least 48 states plus the capital received requests for complete voter registration lists. The National Conference of State Legislatures says the effort began in May 2025, a sharp break from the department’s historically limited role in voter list maintenance. At least 15 states have provided or said they will provide their full statewide lists, while others have offered only public versions that omit sensitive fields.

Courts had dismissed the federal cases against Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island as of April 28, and the Justice Department has appealed several of those losses. In Arizona, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich ruled that the statewide voter registration list was not a document subject to request by the attorney general under federal law, and the case was dismissed with prejudice, blocking the same claim from being refiled in that form. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called the ruling “a win for voter privacy,” and he and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said they would keep defending voters against federal overreach.

In Rhode Island, a Justice Department lawyer reportedly acknowledged the point of seeking unredacted rolls was to share them with Homeland Security so citizenship status could be checked. Election-law groups and civil-rights advocates say the broader effect could be a national voter database built without congressional authorization, with the possibility that the information could be used to lay groundwork for voter purges ahead of the November 2026 midterms.