Bipartisan Pushback and Court Defeats Mount Against Trump DOJ's Voter Roll Crusade
The Trump administration’s aggressive, coordinated campaign to federalize voter list maintenance and obtain unredacted state voter rolls has suffered a series of major, back-to-back defeats in the federal judiciary. With fresh losses in Nevada and Minnesota, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now 0-23 in trial-court lawsuits seeking sensitive, unredacted voter registration data. However, a major ruling from the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reveals a growing ideological split among appellate judges, signaling that the administration’s legal campaign is actively paving a path to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Monday, August 17, 2026, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking Minnesota’s unredacted statewide voter registration list (United States v. Simon, No. 0:25-cv-03761). The DOJ had demanded sensitive voter data—including full names, birthdates, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers—to investigate potential noncitizen voting. In a sharp rebuke of the administration’s tactics, Judge Menendez wrote:
"The government suggests it is permitted to use a civil action as a ‘fishing expedition.’ But an ordinary litigant isn’t allowed to seek discovery first and allege a claim later, and the federal government has no special privilege to do so either."
Judge Menendez's ruling followed a similar dismissal by a federal trial judge in Nevada on Friday, August 14, 2026, marking the 22nd and 23rd consecutive trial-court defeats for the DOJ's national voter roll campaign. Federal judges across more than 20 states have now held that the federal laws cited by the DOJ—including the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the National Voter Registration Act—do not authorize the federal government to compel states to hand over unredacted voter registration databases.1
A Growing Appellate Split
Despite this wall of trial-court defeats, the legal landscape is shifting at the appellate level. On Friday, August 14, 2026, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied the DOJ's request to rehear its dismissed lawsuit seeking Michigan's unredacted voter rolls (United States v. Benson, No. 26-1225). While the rehearing was denied, the order revealed that nine Republican-appointed judges supported the Trump administration's legal theories.
In a dissenting opinion, Sixth Circuit Judge Amul R. Thapar, joined by several other conservative colleagues, argued that the panel's majority had gutted a vital federal tool to inspect election records and prevent voter fraud. Judge Thapar wrote:
"Under the panel’s opinion, the Attorney General can get the underlying voting records, but he can’t get the list of registered voters. So he will have no way of knowing whether ineligible individuals are on the state’s voter rolls. That gap will, in turn, hamper efforts to enforce federal laws aimed at limiting voter fraud and protecting the rights of eligible voters in our elections."
The substantial support from nine appellate judges in the Sixth Circuit represents the first major judicial crack in what had been a unified wall of court defeats for the administration. With similar appeals pending in multiple federal circuits, the mounting disagreement between trial courts and conservative appellate panels makes a final resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court highly likely.
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An instance of Federal courts protect local election control by repeatedly denying executive attempts to compel or overhaul voter lists. — It shows federal courts systematically denying executive demands for unredacted voter lists to protect state authority and voter privacy from federal overreach. ↩︎