Washington — The Justice Department on Thursday sued six states for what it said was their refusal to turn over statewide voter registration lists sought by the attorney general.
The suits were filed against the top election officials in California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and allege the moves not to provide the voter registration rolls violate federal law.
“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible and secure — states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.”
The suits, filed in federal courts in each state, seek to force the elections officials to provide all voter information contained in their registration rolls, including names, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The Justice Department claimed that failing to turn over the rolls prevents the attorney general from determining whether the states are following list maintenance requirements in a federal law known as the Help America Vote Act.
It has already sued Oregon and Maine for failing to provide information on procedures for maintaining their voter lists and copies of statewide voter registration rolls.
Bondi requested the information from states earlier this year to examine whether the states were complying with components of voting rights laws. But in some instances, the state officials expressed concern about handing over the voter registration lists and other information.
California’s secretary of state, for example, raised privacy protections to the Justice Department in response to its request for voter information. The top lawyer for Minnesota’s secretary of state said that the department did not identify any legal basis that would entitle it to the state’s voter registration roll, according to court filings. He also asked the Justice Department to provide information showing that the data would be protected and used properly before the state considered whether to share the list.
New Hampshire’s secretary of state told the Justice Department in an August letter that state law prevented him from disclosing its voter registration list, according to court papers.
President Trump has for years railed against states’ voting procedures, claiming without evidence that some state voter rolls are filled with dead voters or people in the U.S. illegally. He has repeatedly made false assertions that the 2020 election was rife with widespread fraud and rigged against him. His campaign brought dozens of lawsuits challenging the election results, and judges repeatedly rejected the election-fraud claims.
After returning to the White House in January, Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at overhauling U.S. elections. The directive mandates the Election Assistance Commission, a federal independent regulatory commission, to require documentary proof of citizenship in the standardized national voter registration form and mandates that states record information about the documents presented by voters.
Federal judges have blocked provisions of the law imposing new requirements on proof of citizenship to register to vote in U.S. elections.
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