A federal judge has dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking Wisconsin’s full, unredacted voter registration records, the latest in a series of rulings rejecting the Trump administration’s demands for sensitive state election data.
U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson of the Western District of Wisconsin granted the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s (WEC) motion to dismiss on Thursday, ruling that federal law does not require the state to turn over detailed personal information on its roughly 3.6 million registered voters.
The DOJ filed suit against Wisconsin in December, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1960 in seeking the state’s complete voter file; including full names, dates of birth, residential addresses, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Wisconsin officials had provided publicly available data but declined to release the unredacted list, citing state privacy protections and limits on federal authority over elections.
In its motion to dismiss, filed in February, WEC argued that the DOJ had not followed proper procedures and that the Civil Rights Act does not authorize a broad demand for confidential records absent a specific investigation. The state said it had already cooperated by sharing redacted or public information.
Peterson’s order aligns with dismissals in multiple other states, including California, Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Arizona, where judges have found the DOJ’s requests exceeded statutory authority under the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act.
The DOJ has appealed several of those rulings. Last year, it launched a national effort to obtain statewide voter rolls from dozens of states as part of efforts to review election integrity and maintenance of voter lists.
A DOJ spokesman declined immediate comment on the Wisconsin ruling and did not indicate whether it would appeal.
