Judge blocks Justice Dept.’s request for Michigan voter data

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit trying to get a look at Michigan’s voter rolls, saying the Justice Department is not entitled to the information.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee to the court in western Michigan, is the latest in a string of legal losses for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is leading a campaign to force states to clean up their voting lists.

Ms. Bondi argued the Civil Rights Act of 1960, enacted to combat Jim Crow voting laws, gave her the power to compel states to turn over their lists.

But Judge Jarbou said that law only applies to voter applications themselves, not to the state’s own lists compiling those whom it has registered.

“If the distinction between voter registration applications and voter registration lists is overly pedantic, it is a pedantic distinction made by Congress, and it is Congress’s prerogative to make distinctions that may seem unnecessary to a person reading the statute over six decades after its passage,” the judge wrote.

Her ruling follows those of judges in California and Oregon who have also blocked Justice Department requests for voter files from those states.

In the California case, the judge ruled that the Justice Department was acting at cross-purposes to the law, which he said was intended to promote the right to vote. He said the Justice Department’s effort to clean up voter rolls worked against that.

President Trump has called for nationalizing some states’ election operations, claiming high levels of voter fraud and irregularities in conducting elections. His opponents say he’s offered scant evidence of those claims.

Before the president’s nationalization comments, the Justice Department had requested voter records from states, including names, addresses, dates of birth and each state’s unique voter identification number — usually a partial Social Security number or a driver’s license number.

That information would allow the federal government to compare names across states to detect duplication and to check its own databases to spot deceased voters or those who aren’t actually citizens, yet ended up on the rolls.

States led by both Democrats and Republicans have resisted the demands, spurring at least two dozen lawsuits to try to compel the information.