A federal judge in Colorado has thrown out the Justice Department's bid to obtain the state's unredacted voter roll, and this time the government cannot try again. On August 4, U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer dismissed the suit with prejudice, a ruling that bars the department from refiling the same claim [2]. Brimmer, an appointee of President George W. Bush, found the government had failed to establish a valid "basis and purpose" for the demand under federal law [2].
The Colorado case is one piece of a much larger campaign. The Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted statewide voter rolls, citing the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act [1]. The records the department wants are not names on a public list. They include voters' dates of birth, home addresses, partial Social Security numbers, and driver's-license numbers [1].
How the campaign is faring depends on which scorecard you read, and the two do not line up. Democracy Docket, which tracks the litigation, calls Colorado the department's "20th straight loss" and puts the government at 0-for-20 [2]. CBS News, counting the full docket, tallies 21 suits lost or dismissed, one voluntarily withdrawn, and nine still pending, a breakdown that sums to the full 31 [1]. The one withdrawal came in Oklahoma, after the state agreed to provide the data the department sought [1]. Pixel Politics could not reconcile the two running counts as of August 6, and reports both as published rather than splitting the difference.
The nine cases still open, by the CBS tally, are in Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, Utah, Vermont, and Washington [1]. Georgia's appears on that list because the department refiled it after an earlier dismissal on venue grounds [1]. The losses are not confined to trial courts. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's rejection of the department's attempt to obtain Michigan's rolls [1].
What the record makes plain is that the rulings are not breaking along the lines of who appointed the judge. Brimmer sits on the bench because of a Republican president, and he found the same defect other courts have found, that the government did not offer a lawful reason for the collection it demanded [2]. That is the through-line across the campaign. The demand is losing not on politics but on whether federal law authorizes it at all.
The stakes sit with the voters whose files are the object of the fight. In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold declined to turn over the unredacted data, and the court's dismissal leaves that refusal standing without the threat of a refiled suit. For registered voters across the 30 states and the District, the question is whether the sensitive identifiers in their registration files, the birthdates and partial Social Security and driver's-license numbers, move into federal custody on a demand that courts keep finding unfounded. As covered yesterday, the department's voter-roll and citizenship-data push has been advancing on several fronts at once. The court record so far is running the other way.
