Justice Department sues California, other states that have declined to share voter rolls

The U.S. Justice Department sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Thursday for failing to hand over the state’s voter rolls, alleging she is unlawfully preventing federal authorities from ensuring state compliance with federal voting regulations and safeguarding federal elections against fraud.

The Justice Department also sued Weber’s counterparts in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, who have similarly declined its requests for their states’ voter rolls.

“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement on the litigation. “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.”

In its lawsuit against Weber, who is the state’s top elections official, the Justice Department argues that it is charged — including under the National Voter Registration Act — with ensuring that states have proper protocols for registering voters and maintaining accurate and up-to-date rolls, and therefore is due access to state voter rolls in order to ensure they are so maintained.

“The United States has now been forced to bring the instant action to seek legal remedy for Defendants’ refusal to comply with lawful requests pursuant to federal law,” the lawsuit states.

Weber, in a statement, called the lawsuit “a fishing expedition and pretext for partisan policy objectives,” a “blatant overreach” and “an unprecedented intrusion unsupported by law or any previous practice or policy of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

“The U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to utilize the federal court system to erode the rights of the State of California and its citizens by trying to intimidate California officials into giving up the private and personal information of 23 million California voters,” Weber said.

She said California law requires that state officials “protect our voters’ sensitive private information,” and that the Justice Department not only “failed to provide sufficient legal authority to justify their intrusive demands,” but ignored invitations from the state for federal officials to come to Sacramento and view the data in person — a process Weber said was “contemplated by federal statutes” and would “protect California citizens’ private and personal data from misuse.”

The Justice Department has demanded a “current electronic copy of California’s computerized statewide voter registration list”; lists of “all duplicate registration records in Imperial, Los Angeles, Napa, Nevada, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, and Stanislaus counties”; a “list of all duplicate registrants who were removed from the statewide voter registration list” and the dates of their removals.

It has also demanded a list of all registrations that have been canceled because voters in the state died; an explanation for a recent decline in the recorded number of “inactive” voters in the state; and a list of “all registrations, including date of birth, driver’s license number, and last four digits of Social Security Number, that were cancelled due to non-citizenship of the registrant.”

The litigation is the latest move by the Trump administration to push its demands around voting policies onto individual states, which are broadly tasked under the constitution with managing their own elections.

The lawsuit follows an executive order by Trump in March that purported to radically reshape voting rules nationwide, including by requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship and requiring states to disregard mail ballots that are not received by election day.

The order built on years of unsubstantiated claims by Trump — and refuted by experts — that the U.S. voting system currently allows for rampant fraud and abuse, and that those failures compromised the results of elections, including his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Various voting rights groups and 19 states, including California, have sued to block the order.

Advocacy groups say the order, and especially it’s requirements for proving citizenship, would disenfranchise legal U.S. citizen voters who lack ready access to identifying documents such as passports and REAL IDs. They have said barring the acceptance of mail ballots received after election day would also create barriers for voters, especially in large state such as California that need time to process large volumes of ballots.

California currently accepts ballots if they are postmarked by election day and received within a certain number of days after.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has called Trump’s executive order an “illegal power grab” that California and other states will “fight like hell” to stop. His office referred questions about the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Weber to Weber’s office.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, defended the need for the lawsuit, saying in a statement that clean voter rolls “protect American citizens from voting fraud and abuse, and restore their confidence that their states’ elections are conducted properly, with integrity, and in compliance with the law.”

Weber, who in April called Trump’s executive order “an illegal attempt to trample on the states and Congress’s constitutional authority over elections,” said Thursday that she would not be bowed by the lawsuit.

“The sensitive data of California citizens should not be used as a political tool to undermine the public trust and integrity of elections,” she said. “I will always stand with Californians to protect states’ rights against federal overreach and our voters’ sensitive personal information. Californians deserve better. America deserves better.”