Federal judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit seeking unredacted statewide voter file

MADISON, Wis. —  In a major victory for voters, a federal court has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit — an unprecedented overreach into state election administration — seeking to force Wisconsin to hand over the complete, unredacted electronic voter registration list of every voter in the state.

The ruling in United States v. Wisconsin Elections Commission ends the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) unlawful attempt to invoke a 1960 civil rights law to compel Wisconsin to turn over sensitive personal voter data, including partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. State and federal laws prohibit the release of this information.

Attorneys from Law Forward, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and the national ACLU, represented Common Cause and a group of individual Wisconsin voters in the case.

“Today’s ruling is a massive victory for voter privacy and a rejection of federal overreach. The decision ensures voters are protected from an unauthorized national database that would have been a goldmine for hackers and a tool for intimidation. Our elections remain safe, secure, and in the hands of Wisconsinites where they belong,” said Bianca Shaw, Common Cause’s Wisconsin state director.

“Requiring Wisconsin to disclose this sensitive personal information despite laws prohibiting just that would have threatened the privacy of Wisconsin voters and the removal of eligible voters from voter rolls for no reason,” said Doug Poland, Law Forward’s director of litigation. “Federal law leaves it to states to administer their own elections, and Wisconsin already has reliable processes for maintaining its voter rolls. Given the rarity of noncitizen voting, this lawsuit, and similar efforts in other states, are thinly-masked efforts to manipulate and subvert future elections. The court recognized this as an illegal attempt to gather and weaponize data on Americans, dressed up in the language of voting rights enforcement. We will continue to stand up to the Trump administration’s illegal schemes to interfere with elections administration and erode the rights of voters in Wisconsin.”

“The court today affirmed what we already know to be true: confidential voter data is protected under the law, and the DOJ can’t just unlawfully order WEC to hand over that information for political purposes,” said Ryan Cox, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin. “This ruling protects against federal intrusions into Wisconsin’s election system, ensures private voter data is safe from abuse, and prevents the Trump administration from playing politics with our right to vote.”

“This ruling is a victory for all Wisconsin voters,” said Jonathan Topaz, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “To date, eight courts have issued merits rulings in the Trump administration’s cookie-cutter lawsuits demanding sensitive personal data from millions of voters across the country, and the administration has lost all eight. The administration is seeking this data for pretextual purposes as it attempts to build an illegal voter database to try to intimidate eligible voters, including in Wisconsin, and remove them from the rolls. We won’t let them.”

The groups argued that the administration’s stated rationale — routine voter list maintenance — was a pretext, and that the DOJ  had already shared state voter data with election-denier advocacy groups.

In a Minnesota hearing earlier this year, DOJ admitted it did not know whether the administration could use voter files to build a comprehensive database of every American who has ever voted. The brief also argued that even a valid DOJ demand would not entitle the government to unredacted records, and that courts have consistently required redactions to protect voters’ constitutional rights.

The Trump administration has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for voter lists. According to the State Democracy Research Initiative, to date, eight federal district courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s suits on the merits including courts in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, and Maine. The Wisconsin federal court’s decision follows those rulings, which rejected materially identical DOJ demands. 

The ruling is here: https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2026/05/89-Dismissal-order.pdf