A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a US Justice Department lawsuit seeking California to change their voter names, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal” and accusing the federal government of trying to “limit the right of many Americans to vote.”
US District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee based in Santa Ana, questioned the Justice Department’s motives and called its lawsuit seeking voter information from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber not just an overreach in state-run elections, but a threat to American democracy.
“The disclosure of this information to the federal government will have a negative impact on voter registration that could lead to lower voter turnout as voters fear that their information will be used for an improper or illegal purpose,” Carter wrote. “This danger threatens the right to vote that is the foundation of American democracy.”
Carter wrote that “the takeover of democracy does not happen all at once; it is removed piece by piece until there is nothing left,” and that the Justice Department case was “one of those cuts that puts all Americans at risk.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.
In a video he posted on social media X early Thursday, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon — who heads the Civil Rights Department at the Justice Department — said he was proud of his office’s efforts to “clean up voter rolls nationally,” including suing states for their records.
“We will touch all the states and complete this project,” he said.
Weber, California’s chief elections official, said in a written statement that he is “tasked with ensuring that California election laws are enforced – including state laws that protect California data privacy.”
“I will continue to keep my promise to the people of California to protect our democracy, and I will continue to challenge this administration that has no respect for the law and our right to vote,” Weber said.
The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom called the decision another example of “Trump and his administration losing in California” – one day after another court upheld California’s redistricting plan under Proposition 50, which the Trump administration also challenged in court after the state’s voters overwhelmingly passed it in November.
The Justice Department sued Weber in September after he refused to provide detailed voter information for about 23 million Californians, alleging that he was illegally obstructing federal authorities from ensuring the state complied with federal voting laws and protecting federal elections against fraud.
It also sued Weber’s colleagues in other states who also refused the department’s requests for their state’s voter rolls.
The lawsuit followed President Trump’s executive order in March that required voters to provide proof of citizenship and ordered states to disregard ballots not received on Election Day. It also followed years of Trump’s allegations, made without evidence, that voting in California was marred by widespread fraud and non-citizen voting — part of his broader and equally unsupported claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Announcing the case, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in September that “clean voter names are the foundation of free and fair elections,” and that the Department of Justice will ensure they are available across the country.
Weber denounced the case at the time as a “fishing expedition and pretext for partisan political purposes,” and as “an unprecedented intrusion that could not be supported by law or any previous practice or policy of the US Department of Justice.”
The Department of Justice requested a “current electronic copy of California’s statewide voter registration list”; a list of “all duplicate registration records in Imperial, Los Angeles, Napa, Nevada, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, and Stanislaus counties”; “a list of all duplicate registrants removed from the nationwide voter registration list”; and the dates of their removal.
It also sought a list of all canceled registrations due to voter deaths; an explanation for the recent decline in the record number of “inactive” voters in California; and a list of “all registrations, including date of birth, driver’s license number, and the last four digits of the Social Security Number, that have been canceled due to the registrant’s non-citizenship.”
Carter, in his decision Thursday, took issue with the Justice Department’s reliance on civil rights laws to prosecute.
“The Department of Justice wants to use a civil rights law that was enacted with an entirely different purpose to collect and store an unprecedented amount of confidential voter information. This effort goes beyond what Congress intended when it passed the original law,” Carter wrote.
Carter wrote that the legislation in question — including Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 — was passed to protect the voting rights of black Americans in the face of “persistent voter suppression” and to “combat the effects of discriminatory and unfair registration laws that diminish the right to vote.”
Carter found that the Justice Department had not provided “an explanation for why the unaltered voter files of millions of Californians, an unprecedented request, were needed” for the Justice Department to investigate the alleged problems he cited, and that the executive branch did not have the authority to seek that data at one time without an explanation.
