Courts Toss DOJ Voter Data Demands in Wisconsin, Maine (1)

The Justice Department’s efforts to obtain voting information of Wisconsin and Maine residents using a civil rights law meant to crack-down on anti-Black voting practices was shut down by separate federal district courts Thursday.

Like federal tribunals in hotly-contested political battlegrounds Michigan and Arizona, the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and US District Court for the District of Maine denied the federal government’s requests for voter information, continuing President Donald Trump’s losing streak in these cases ahead of the congressional midterms.

Under the Help America Vote Act and National Voter Registration Act states are required to meet uniform standards for voting records and, in limited circumstances, the Justice Department can seek certain records from states under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

But that law doesn’t give federal officers the ability to demand unredacted voting registration lists with voters’ personal information, said Judge James D. Peterson of the Western District of Wisconsin. The state’s lists are records created by the state itself—not the documents sent in by prospective voters that the civil rights law required states preserve and provide to the government to make sure states weren’t denying registration to minority community voters or imposing poll taxes.

“Thus far, the government has requested voter registration lists from 48 states and Washington, D.C., and it has initiated lawsuits to compel production against 30 states and Washington D.C.,” Peterson said in his order. “The court has concluded that Title III does not even apply to the government’s request for Wisconsin’s voter registration list, so there is no way that it could amend its complaint to state a claim for relief.”

In a footnote Peterson mentioned that courts have also made similar rulings in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. “No court,” he said, “has granted the government’s request.”

‘Blind Eye’

In Maine Judge Lance E. Walker agreed with the Wisconsin ruling but also went further, finding that the federal government’s stated purpose—to ensure compliance with federal rules for registration lists—doesn’t relate to the civil rights law’s purpose: allowing investigations of voting rights violations.

The federal government was asking the court to turn a “blind eye” to “traditional principles of federalism” in state-run elections, Walker said.

If the Justice Department wants to enforce Help America Vote Act and National Voter Registration Act standards then “it must use the pre-suit investigation and enforcement mechanisms that Congress provided in those statutes,” Walker said.

However, he said those laws don’t “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.”

The Wisconsin Department of Justice represented its state, and the Office of the Maine Attorney General represented its state. According to the docket, only attorneys from Washington represented the Justice Department in these matters.

The cases are United States v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, W.D. Wis., No. 3:25-cv-01036, claims dismissed 5/21/26, and United States v. Bellows, D. Me., No. 1:25-cv-00468, claims dismissed 5/21/26.