Not a single federal judge has granted Donald Trump’s administration access to voter files in any of the 30 states where the Department of Justice is fighting a legal battle for sensitive data for millions of Americans. After 23 straight losses in court, the Justice Department is now sending threatening letters to election officials, warning states that they are “currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation” for access to records related to the 2024 election. That was news to Utah’s Republican Lt.
Governor Deidre Henderson. Similar letters were sent to more than two dozen other state election officials as the Trump administration wages a government-wide effort to assume federal control of the nation’s elections and restrict ballot access for tens of thousands of voters. It’s unclear what, exactly, the Justice Department is investigating.
The letters don’t point to any criminal statutes or make any specific allegations of wrongdoing, but the pressure campaign follows the Trump administration’s efforts to identify alleged fraud in the nation’s elections, which the president baselessly insists are being manipulated by noncitizen voters and Democratic officials. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon said her office sent the letters to “states that refused to comply with federal law” and have not provided her with voter registration lists. The Justice Department has been seeking access to unredacted voter registration databases that contain sensitive information for virtually every voter in the U.S., including driver’s licenses and partial Social Security numbers.
The Civil Rights Act requires state election officials to preserve all voting records for 22 months after an election, which expired last week for the 2024 general election. But the Justice Department argues that the information must be retained while states are under litigation. Never expected to have the federal government insert themselves to this degree.” If the Justice Department truly cared about election security, “you would not be threatening election officials with prison sentences, you would not be suing all of us, you would not be investigating all of us constantly,” Henderson added.
Despite losing every legal battle for voter data so far, the Justice Department continues to appeal orders against it. The government announced Wednesday that it is appealing a West Virginia ruling after losing a case against the state’s Republican Secretary of State Kris Warner. In his July order tossing the case, District Judge Thomas Johnson, who was appointed by George W.
Bush, appeared frustrated by the wave of lawsuits filed by the government.
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