The Justice Department's campaign to collect voters' personal data from the states has now lost in court more than a dozen times, and won nowhere. On July 14, a federal judge in Albuquerque threw out the DOJ's suit demanding New Mexico's complete voter file, with a sentence that has become the pattern: 'Nowhere does the DOJ articulate any factual suggestion that New Mexico has violated the NVRA or HAVA' [1].
The department had asked New Mexico to hand over its voters' names, dates of birth, addresses, driver's-license numbers and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers [1]. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver refused, saying she 'absolutely will not risk any disclosure of voters' private data' [1]. Judge Judith Herrera agreed the department had alleged no actual violation of federal election law to justify the demand.
New Mexico is not alone, and that is the story. The DOJ has filed 31 lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter data, and a tracker kept by the University of Wisconsin's State Democracy Research Initiative counts 12 of those suits now dismissed - with no court, at any level, having yet ruled for the department [2]. Virginia's and West Virginia's suits were both dismissed the same day as New Mexico's [1][3].
Data
| Filed (vs 30 states + D.C.) | 31 lawsuits |
|---|---|
| Dismissed by courts so far | 12 lawsuits |
| Won by DOJ | 0 lawsuits |
The record matters because the demands are not costless even when they fail. A federal request for every voter's birth date, license number and partial Social Security number is a data-security risk in itself, and the lawsuits pressure state officials either to surrender that information or to spend public money fighting to protect it [1]. Twelve courts have now said the department cannot compel it without alleging that the state broke the law - which, by the judges' reading, it has not [1][2].
What the scoreboard shows, thirty-one suits in, is a campaign that has produced a great deal of litigation and not one judicial win [2]. The states keep declining to hand over their voters' private data, and the courts keep agreeing that they do not have to [1][2].
