DOJ can’t demand Arizona’s voter database

A federal judge on Tuesday said the
Trump administration has no right to Arizona’s voter registration
database, the latest in a string of losses for the U.S. Department of
Justice in its quest to gather voter information in every state. 

Judge Susan Brnovich dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department cannot refile. Brnovich was appointed to the bench in 2018 by President Donald Trump.

This is the sixth time a federal judge has rejected a DOJ lawsuit against a state demanding it surrender its voter file.

In January, the DOJ sued Arizona
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes after he refused several demands to
turn over the state’s voter database. DOJ first asked Fontes to provide
an unredacted electronic copy of Arizona’s voter registration rolls in
July 2025. The next month, he told the Trump administration that state and federal privacy laws bar him from doing so. 

The lawsuit alleged that the Civil
Rights Act of 1960, which the DOJ describes as imposing a “sweeping
obligation on election officials” to retain and preserve election
records, granted then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “sweeping power to
obtain these records.” 

While DOJ framed the request for voter roll information in all 50 states
as part of an effort to ensure compliance with federal voting laws,
voting rights advocates and other critics said its true aim is creating a
national voter database in order to ferret out undocumented
immigrants. 

In March, a DOJ attorney conceded to a
court in Rhode Island that voter registration data collected from
states — a number have voluntarily given the data to the Trump
administration — is being shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so it can scour voter rolls for noncitizen voters. 

Trump has repeatedly, and falsely,
claimed that there are tens of millions of undocumented voters —
something he attempted to prove during his first term in an effort that
failed to produce any evidence. 

Multiple studies have found that
noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare and poses no meaningful threat to
election integrity. When the Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed data
compiled by the Heritage Foundation, an especially conservative think
tank, it “found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and
2023” and concluded that “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting
has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

And Arizona voters in 2004 required
that everyone provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
(Arizona is the only state with such a law.)

In her order dismissing the case,
Brnovich relied heavily on analysis from a federal judge in Michigan,
who similarly dismissed DOJ’s attempt to get that state’s voter file.

Like that judge, Brnovich concluded
that Arizona’s statewide voter registration list is not a record the
state must preserve and produce on AG demand under federal law. That’s
because the database is created by state elections officials, and the
requirement in federal law to give DOJ voter records applies only to
applications and similar records that voters submit to election
officials.

And Brnovich also noted that the
Trump administration’s argument would create an internal conflict in
federal election law: One section in the Civil Rights Act creates a
criminal penalty for “altering” documents that must be preserved and
turned over to the DOJ, but the National Voter Registration Act and the
Help America Vote Act require elections officials to regularly update
the electronic voter database. 

“Even if (the Civil Rights Act) includes a categorically ‘sweeping’ number of documents… it is not limitless,” Brnovich wrote.

This is the sixth judge to dismiss a
DOJ suit seeking voter registration data. Arizona joins California,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island in prevailing in
court. 

In each instance, federal judges have
ruled that the Civil Rights Act election provisions do not apply to
statewide voter databases.