A federal judge in Connecticut just handed the Justice Department in its nationwide crusade for state voter rolls — and buried a savage one-liner in the fine print while doing it.
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The Trump administration has been filing lawsuits like this all over the country, seeking a comprehensive trove of sensitive information about voters that even includes their driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Some states have complied, but many, including GOP-controlled states, have refused — and so far, the DOJ has failed to compel the info from any of the holdouts.
In the 16th such decision, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, herself a Trump appointee, tossed DOJ’s bid to force Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas to hand over the state’s complete, unredacted voter registration list, finding the list doesn’t count as a record that “comes into” the state’s possession under the 1960 Civil Rights Act provision DOJ was leaning on, because Connecticut officials build the list themselves out of data fed in by all 169 municipalities.
Dooley leaned heavily on a Sixth Circuit ruling involving Michigan’s Secretary of State, and made clear Connecticut is just the latest domino to fall — nearly identical DOJ losses have already piled up in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, Wisconsin, Maine and Arizona.
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Dooley didn’t pretend this was a novel legal frontier, either.
“So too here,” she wrote, dryly applying the same fatal logic that’s now sunk the government’s case in courtroom after courtroom.
The ruling zeroes in on a technical landmine for DOJ’s theory: the same 1960 law criminalizes altering the very records it claims must be preserved — so if voter rolls counted as protected documents, the routine updates states are legally required to make (removing dead voters, changing addresses) would turn election officials into federal criminals. Dooley rejected an interpretation that “would place Title III on a collision course” with the very voter-list-maintenance laws Congress separately demanded.
Marc Elias, the voting rights attorney representing Connecticut in the case, took a victory lap at the ruling, posting to X, “DOJ is now 0-16 in cases to gain access to state voter files. Elias Law Group remains undefeated.”
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