DOJ escalates push for states’ voter data

Brushing aside legal setbacks, the Justice Department is intensifying its quest to force states to turn over their voter rolls.

The department filed five new lawsuits against states that are resisting the demands.

That came a day after the department appealed rulings by federal judges in Oregon, California and Michigan blocking the administration from getting a look at those states’ data.

“Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said. “This latest series of litigation underscores that this Department of Justice is fulfilling its duty to ensure transparency, voter roll maintenance and secure elections across the country.”

The new states that earned lawsuits are Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Jersey.

They join 24 previous lawsuits against 23 states and the District of Columbia.

The goal is to use the data to carry out President Trump’s demand to clean up state voter rolls.

Ms. Bondi says the Civil Rights Act of 1960, passed to combat Jim Crow laws, gives her total power to demand states’ voter records.

Most of the cases are still working their way through the district court level, but the judges in the Oregon, California and Michigan cases have already ruled — and tossed out DOJ’s lawsuit.

In Michigan, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee, said the law applies only to individual voter applications, not to the compiled voter list itself.

“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.

That was different reasoning than California, where U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee, ruled that the DOJ was acting at cross-purposes to the law.

He said the law was intended to promote the right to vote.

“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data. This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation,” Judge Carter opined.

And in Oregon, Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai, a Biden appointee, called the idea of the federal government compiling a database of names to remove from voter rolls a “dark theory.”

The appeal of the Oregon and California cases will go to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Michigan case goes to the 6th Circuit.

Of the 29 lawsuits filed, only five of the states are run by Republicans.

DOJ is seeking names, addresses and unique information such as dates of birth and the voter identification numbers — usually a partial Social Security or driver’s license number.

States say their laws prevent sharing that level of detail.

Mr. Trump, in his State of the Union address, called out election fraud and asked Congress to pass legislation to demand voters prove citizenship to register and show ID to vote.

“The cheating is rampant in our elections,” he said.

He said the issue is wildly popular with voters, but Democrats resist.

“They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say what imagination they have,” he said. “They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it.”