A federal judge in Washington rejected the Justice Department’s bid to obtain the District of Columbia’s full voter registration list on Thursday, ruling the administration has no legal authority to compel the city to turn over birthdates, ID numbers and other personal data on registered voters.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee, said the Civil Rights Act of 1960 lets the attorney general request individual voter registration records but does not extend to a jurisdiction’s compiled voter list. The Justice Department had cited that 1960 law, along with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, as its basis for the demand.
“The court concludes that Title III’s retention and preservation obligation does not cover voter registration lists,” Moss wrote in his ruling, reported by The Washington Times.
Moss noted that 20 other district courts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit had already reached the same conclusion in similar cases brought by the department against other states, leaving him “with no shortage of guidance on these issues.” He wrote that if the Justice Department wants the authority to obtain full voter lists, “it needs to lodge that objection with Congress.”
The department is seeking the data to run names through federal databases in an effort to identify ineligible voters, including noncitizens and people who have died. Washington provided the department its publicly available voter list, but that version excludes driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, the identifiers investigators say are needed to make reliable matches against federal records.
The 1960 law was originally written to give the Justice Department tools to root out voter suppression against Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. It authorizes the attorney general to compel the production of “all records and papers which come into his possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax or other act requisite to voting” from state election officers.
The department argued voter lists qualify as registration records under that statute. Moss disagreed, ruling that lists compiled by election officials from underlying registration records don’t themselves “come into” the officials’ possession within the meaning of the law, since the states and jurisdictions create the lists themselves.
Moss’s ruling marks the latest loss in a broader legal campaign the Justice Department launched against 30 states and the District of Columbia over voter roll access. Similar requests targeting Maryland and Virginia also failed earlier this year, both before judges appointed by President Trump during his first term.
