Supreme Court refuses PILF appeals, leaving voter-roll access rulings intact

On March 2, 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment to take up two appeals from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative public-interest group that sought broader access to unredacted state voter registration databases in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The denials leave intact circuit-court rulings that dismissed the suits and block the immediate expansion of public access to the records PILF sought.

PILF had asked federal judges to compel Pennsylvania and Michigan to disclose more detailed, unredacted voter registration information. In the Michigan case the group also sought to force the state to take additional steps to remove deceased registrants from its rolls. Those requests were rebuffed at the district and appeals levels before the Supreme Court declined review.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Pennsylvania matter held that PILF lacked legal "standing" to sue under the "1993 voting law" because it "hadn't shown it suffered any concrete injury." The 6th U.S. Circuit reached the same conclusion on standing in the Michigan matter, and separately concluded that Michigan "had done enough to remove deceased people with a program that regularly compared the Michigan voter list with information obtained from federal, state and local sources." The Pennsylvania case is Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Schmidt, 25-379. The Michigan case is Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Benson, 25-437.

By leaving those rulings in place the high court effectively preserves the status quo for election officials and privacy protections applied to state voter files in two prominent swing states. Election administrators have argued that broad, unredacted disclosure of voter-registration information raises privacy and security concerns and can complicate routine maintenance of the rolls. The appeals court decisions focused instead on the legal threshold for bringing such suits, finding PILF did not demonstrate the concrete harm required to proceed.

The denials come amid heightened national debate over access to election data and more aggressive efforts by political actors to obtain voter records since 2020. The move allows the Supreme Court to avoid direct involvement in a politically charged dispute tied to President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that his 2020 election loss was driven by fraud. The administration and its allies have signaled an appetite for more intervention in election administration, with Trump calling on Republicans to "federalize" elections and promising an executive order over voter-ID requirements. Federal enforcement actions have added to tensions; in January the FBI raided an elections center in Georgia to seize voting records and other data from the 2020 election.

For now, the practical effect is limited: the specific circuit-court holdings remain binding in their jurisdictions and the litigation path for PILF narrows unless the foundation can identify a new, concrete injury to satisfy standing requirements. The Supreme Court's routine denials of certiorari do not endorse the lower courts' reasoning, but they preserve the immediate legal barrier to expanded public access to unredacted voter-registration data in the two states at issue.