The DOJ has sued 30 states for sensitive voter records and, by Reuters’ count, has now lost 26 straight cases — even as the Supreme Court hands it wins on citizenship checks. A federal judge has blocked the Department of Justice from obtaining Georgia’s unredacted statewide voter registration list, handing President Donald Trump’s voter roll campaign its 26th consecutive legal loss. U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert ruled Wednesday that the DOJ has no right to demand records containing voters’ birthdays, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and email addresses.
The timing matters. The ruling lands weeks before the November midterms, just days after the Supreme Court handed the administration a separate win on citizenship checks — a split that shows how uneven the legal battlefield has become for both sides. Calvert, a nominee of former President Joe Biden, sided with Georgia, which argued that state privacy statutes prohibit sharing residents’ most sensitive personal identifiers. The state told the court it could only share what is already publicly available — a list containing “all fields that may be publicly disclosed” under Georgia law.
The unredacted list the DOJ sought includes not just registration details but voters’ full voting history. Georgia’s core argument was simple: the public voter file already gives the federal government everything the law allows, and everything beyond that is off-limits The Justice Department told Newsweek it is reviewing the ruling and “will likely appeal.” That means the 26-loss streak could eventually get a second look from a higher court.
The administration’s stated rationale is election integrity. The DOJ has sued 30 states for detailed voter data, arguing it needs the records to assess whether states are complying with federal election rules, including voter-list maintenance requirements. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, announcing the Georgia suit in January, said states need to hand over the information so the federal government can “protect American citizens from vote dilution.” In April, she criticized states for “choosing to fight us in court rather than show their work.”
Critics, including plaintiffs in the related litigation, see something else: a sweeping federal effort to collect personal data on tens of millions of voters, pursued state by state through litigation that has produced a long string of consecutive district-court losses. The losing streak is real, but it is not the whole story. Reuters counted 21 consecutive court defeats for the administration’s voter-data demands before this week’s ruling pushed the tally to 26 — a run of losses in trial courts across the country.
Yet the Supreme Court handed Trump a significant win on the same subject in late September. In an emergency order, the justices lifted restrictions on the revamped SAVE database, a Homeland Security tool states can use to check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls. The court’s unsigned opinion said the federal government has an obligation to respond to state officials seeking to verify voters’ citizenship, while emphasizing the tool should be used for “individualized” checks rather than mass purges close to an election. The three liberal justices dissented publicly.
The effort has a documented flaw at its center: SAVE has mistakenly flagged some eligible voters as potential noncitizens. According to election law expert David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, the Department of Homeland Security itself has acknowledged the data is not perfect. Participation is also voluntary. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has refused to join the program, said the Supreme Court ruling “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”
There is a timing constraint, too. Federal law bars states from systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election, and the Supreme Court opinion suggested that prohibition still applies to mass purges. The administration argues the statute should not block removing improperly registered noncitizens — a question the ruling left open. The ruling lands weeks before the November midterms, when the administration’s citizenship-verification push is ramping up. Tens of millions of voter records were already run through SAVE before a lower court blocked it in June; the Supreme Court’s order cleared the way for that to resume.
But the Georgia decision draws a different boundary. The Supreme Court’s recent action concerned the SAVE citizenship-verification system, not the DOJ’s lawsuits; the Georgia ruling separately rejected the department’s demand for the state’s unredacted list. The two tracks — federal databases and federal lawsuits — are moving in opposite directions. For voters, the stakes are practical. Plaintiffs in the SAVE case warned the ruling puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database.” State officials resisting the DOJ subpoenas say privacy laws exist precisely to keep Social Security and license numbers out of federal hands.
The DOJ says it will likely appeal the Georgia ruling, so the 26th loss may not be the final word on that state’s records. Appeals could take months, well past the midterm elections they were partly aimed at informing. What remains unclear is whether any state will ultimately comply voluntarily, whether appeals courts will treat the 30 suits differently than district judges have, and how SAVE’s error rate plays out in individual voter challenges before November. The streak tells one story; the Supreme Court’s intervention tells another. Both are now part of the same fight.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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