The Justice Department has sued more than 30 states for their voters' personal data and lost every single time, at the hands of judges the Trump administration itself put on the bench.

"DOJ is now 0-16 in cases to gain access to state voter files. Elias Law Group remains undefeated."

— Marc Elias, voting rights attorney for Connecticut

Since May 2025, the Department of Justice has demanded complete, unredacted voter registration lists from 44 states and the District of Columbia. What it wants goes beyond names and addresses. The Justice Department is seeking driver's license numbers, dates of birth, and partial Social Security numbers for tens of millions of Americans. When states refused, citing privacy laws and constitutional limits on federal power, the DOJ responded with 31 federal lawsuits.

As of July 17, 2026, the Justice Department has been defeated in 16 of those cases at the district court level. No court in the country has ever ruled in its favor. The only state to surrender was Oklahoma, which agreed to hand over its voter data in a settlement after the DOJ refused to back down.

The latest loss came in Connecticut, where U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, herself a Trump appointee, dismissed the government's case with a dry one-liner that has become something of a running refrain across the country's federal courtrooms.

"So too here," she wrote, applying the same reasoning that has now sunk the Justice Department's case in courtroom after courtroom.

The legal theory underpinning every one of these lawsuits is the same. The Justice Department leans on Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, a statute enacted to combat voting discrimination in the South. The DOJ argues that the law gives the Attorney General broad authority to inspect and copy any voting records held by a state.

The problem, as Judge Dooley and 15 other federal judges have now explained, is that the statewide voter registration list is not a record that "comes into" the state's possession under the statute. Connecticut, like every other state, builds its own voter rolls from data fed in by local municipalities. The list is a state-created compilation, not a pre-existing document that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was designed to protect.

The ruling zeroes in on what turns out to be a fatal contradiction in the DOJ's theory: the same 1960 law criminalizes altering the very records it claims must be preserved. If voter rolls counted as protected documents under Title III, then the routine maintenance states are legally required to perform, removing dead voters and updating addresses, would turn election officials into federal criminals. Dooley rejected an interpretation that "would place Title III on a collision course" with the voter list maintenance laws that Congress separately mandated.

Translation: the Justice Department's own legal theory would make it a federal crime for states to keep their voter rolls accurate.

The Connecticut ruling was not an outlier. The same legal reasoning has been applied with near-identical language across multiple circuits and dozens of judges, both Republicans and Democrats, appointed by both Trump and Biden. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to weigh in, unanimously affirming the district court's dismissal of the DOJ's suit against Michigan on June 24, 2026. The panel's ruling covered California and Oregon as well, since the DOJ's appeals in those states were heard together.

The states that have thrown the DOJ's cases out stretch across the political spectrum. California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are solidly blue. But so are Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Virginia, and New Mexico, a mix that includes states with Republican leadership and states where control is split. The point is not that these states share a political party. The point is that they share a legal conclusion: the federal government does not have the authority the Justice Department claims.

The full roster of dismissals, in chronological order: California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, New Mexico, and now Connecticut.

What the Justice Department actually wants to do with this data is not entirely clear. The official justification is that the government needs it to assess whether states are complying with federal requirements to maintain accurate voter rolls. But the DOJ has filed identical lawsuits against states with strong voter suppression records and states with expansive voting access. The request does not vary based on which state is targeted or what its voting laws look like. It is a blanket demand for every state's complete voter file, with no stated intention of what the data will be used for once collected.

Privacy advocates have filed their own lawsuits challenging the data collection, arguing that it violates the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. A separate suit alleges that the Department of Homeland Security has illegally transformed its SAVE system into a national citizenship database. At least three states have seen state-level lawsuits challenging their own officials' decisions to share voter data with the federal government.

The Justice Department has appealed or indicated it will appeal every dismissal except the five most recent, which were decided so recently that the agency has not yet filed notices. Those appeals are heading to the First, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits. The DOJ has asked the full Sixth Circuit to rehear its Michigan loss en banc, and the state was directed to respond by July 22.

The most striking aspect of this losing streak is not that the Justice Department is losing to Democratic judges. It is losing to Trump judges. Judge Dooley in Connecticut was confirmed by the Senate in 2023. Many of the other judges on the roster share the same appointment pedigree. The Sixth Circuit panel that affirmed the dismissal of the Michigan suit included judges appointed by Trump and by Obama, and they agreed unanimously.

Marc Elias, the attorney who represents Connecticut and several other states in these cases, has made a practice of posting every win to X with the same running tally. His law firm has a perfect record: every state it has represented has won. The DOJ's record is 0 and 16, with one more state, Oklahoma, that folded rather than go to court.

Elias has noted publicly that even GOP-controlled states refused to comply, which suggests the resistance is not primarily partisan. It is structural. The legal basis the Justice Department is relying on does not survive scrutiny, and the judges tasked with evaluating it, regardless of who appointed them, have found it wanting.

The question is not whether the Justice Department will file more lawsuits. It is whether there is any plausible reading of a 1960 civil rights statute that would authorize the kind of centralized voter surveillance the administration is attempting to build. Every federal court to consider it has said no.

The Justice Department launched this campaign with the stated goal of rooting out fraud in state voter rolls. After 16 losses, zero convictions, zero evidence of systemic fraud, and a unanimous appeals court ruling against it, the most honest description is that it has been trying to assemble a national database of Americans' personal information using a law that was never meant for that purpose.

The administration's own judges have told it, in 16 different courtrooms, that it cannot do that.