“Under our Constitution, states are the primary regulators and administrators of elections for federal office, unless Congress passes legislation that preempts that framework,” one of the judges wrote. “And Congress’s power to do even that is itself subject to limitations.”
Federal judges in Wisconsin and Maine have dismissed U.S. Department of Justice lawsuits seeking access to each state’s voter registration records.
According to The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge James Peterson in Wisconsin said that the state’s voter registration lists do not constitute a record that can be requested under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed. In Maine, Chief U.S. Chief District Judge Lance Walker described the government’s attempt at litigation “half-hearted” before granting the state’s motion to dismiss
CBS News notes that the Trump administration’s attempts to secure voter registration lists from other states—including Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and Rhode Island—have also been unsuccessful.
In his 22-page decision, Walker found that the Justice Department has no authority to force Maine to share its voter rolls. Laws like the Civil Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the National Voter Registration Act “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,” Walker said.
Walker also determined that the Justice Department’s attempts to construe 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.”
Walker, himself a Trump appointee, emphasized that responsibility for managing elections ultimately lies with states.
“Under our Constitution, states are the primary regulators and administrators of elections for federal office, unless Congress passes legislation that preempts that framework,” he wrote. “And Congress’s power to do even that is itself subject to limitations.”
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the rulings affirm that states have the right to manage their own elections.
“Let me be clear—Trump and the DOJ may continue to try to interfere with free and fair elections run by the states,” she said. “We will not let him.”
Peterson, the judge overseeing the Wisconsin case, similarly found that voter registration lists are not documents that must be produced to comply with the Civil Rights Act.
Sources
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit to force Wisconsin to turn over its voter rolls
Federal court dismisses Trump’s lawsuit over Maine voter rolls
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