7th and 8th judges rebuff Justice Department’s attempts to get voter rolls, this time from Maine and Wisconsin

Washington — The Justice Department on Thursday suffered its seventh and eighth losses in its efforts to obtain sensitive voter information from more than two dozen states, with federal judges dismissing its lawsuits seeking access to Maine’s and Wisconsin’s voter rolls.

In the Maine case, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker granted requests to toss out the Justice Department’s suit, which sought to force state officials to hand over Maine’s complete voter registration list, including birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

Walker was the seventh judge to reject the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain states’ voter rolls. But U.S. District Judge James Peterson soon became the eighth when he agreed to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking voter information from Wisconsin.

Attempts to secure voter registration lists from Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island have also been unsuccessful. 

In his 22-page decision, Walker, who was appointed by President Trump in his first term, wrote that the Justice Department cannot compel access to Maine’s voter rolls. He rejected the administration’s claim that the Civil Rights Act and two voting laws, the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, required the state to turn over its voter rolls to the Justice Department. 

The voting laws, Walker said, “do not contemplate production of the unredacted computerized list to the Attorney General so that he might loom over the shoulder of the state election official to point out and demand the correction of inaccuracies in the list.”

The Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act require states to maintain computerized statewide voter registration lists that are accurate and current.

The judge also said that construing the Civil Rights Act “to implicitly provide the United States a right to every [statewide voter registration list] on demand for purposes of conducting a comprehensive, line-by-line audit of the state’s compliance with HAVA and the NVRA would take a sledgehammer to the balance Congress struck when it required states to create and maintain computerized lists of registered voters in the first place.”

The Justice Department first sought a copy of Maine and Wisconsin’s voter registration lists last year to ensure compliance with the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act. 

But after officials from the two states refused to share unredacted versions of their voter rolls, the Trump administration sued, alleging violations of the two voting laws and a provision of the Civil Rights Act. The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states in all and the District of Columbia after state officials declined to turn over their voter rolls.

In dismissing the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Maine, Walker wrote that accepting the government’s interpretation of the civil rights law would require him to “turn a blind eye to traditional principles of federalism and how those principles have found expression in American elections — the backdrop against which Congress enacted the NVRA and HAVA.”

In the Wisconsin case, Peterson, appointed by former President Barack Obama, said that voter registration lists are not documents that must be produced under the Civil Rights Act.

The attempts to secure states’ voter rolls appear to be part of Mr. Trump’s plan to assert more federal control over elections. The president has repeatedly raised allegations of widespread fraud in U.S. elections, though without offering any evidence.