The Justice Department asked Kentucky to turn over its voter rolls in full - not the public version, but the underlying records, including Social Security numbers, driver's-license numbers, dates of birth and home addresses [1].
On July 23, US District Judge Claria Horn Boom said no, dismissing the suit on the ground that those records are not disclosable under Title III of the Help America Vote Act [2].
The ruling is not the first of its kind. It is the seventeenth. By the ACLU's count, seventeen federal courts have now rejected the DOJ's attempts to obtain voter data, across a campaign of nearly three dozen similar actions filed in some 30 states and the District of Columbia [1].
The tally matters because the filings have continued regardless of the losses - a strategy that treats a 17-0 record less as a verdict than as a cost of doing business [1]. The ACLU put the stakes plainly, saying the DOJ has 'no legal basis to demand highly sensitive personal information, no doubt to weaponize it against eligible voters' [1].
What Kentucky adds is one more data point to a pattern that has become hard to miss: every federal judge to rule on it has found the same thing, which is that a national voter file cannot be built out of Kentuckians' Social Security numbers [1][2].
