Watchdog sues DOJ to block national voter database

WASHINGTON (CN) — Voting rights group Common Cause and four voters sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to block it from compiling a national voter database that the watchdog warns allows the government to surveil and disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Common Cause, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union for D.C., argue the database’s creation and its use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements system clearly violates federal statutes, the separation of powers doctrine and the Constitution.

“The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an illegal and unprecedented quest to stockpile millions of Americans’ confidential voter data in a system of records within its Civil Rights Division,” Common Cause claims in the 58-page lawsuit. “Never before has a federal agency centralized this volume of Americans’ voting data in a single system of records. And in so doing, DOJ has flouted statutory safeguards designed to ensure transparency and public participation in the federal government’s collection of Americans’ personal information.”

The lawsuit includes four named plaintiffs, each a U.S. citizen in states that turned over their voter rolls to the Justice Department: Anthony Nel, Haley Smith, Linda Duckworth and Ruth Nasrullah.

Nel, a derived U.S. citizen and Texas resident, received a letter from the local Denton County Voter Registrar on Oct. 21, 2025, informing him he had been identified by Homeland Security’s SAVE system as not being a citizen and instructing he provide proof of citizenship within 30 days or his registration would be cancelled.

Of the sufficient documents, Nel only had an expired passport, which by the time he renewed it two months later had his voter registration cancelled. He was ultimately able to have his registration reinstated, but Common Cause argues Nel continues to worry he will be deemed ineligible again.

“Being caught in such a cycle, with his voting rights on the line, is distressing to him,” Common Cause said. “He feels compelled to continue regularly checking his voter registration status to ensure it is not wrongly cancelled again.”

Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, the Justice Department has demanded 48 states and the District turn over unreacted statewide voter registration lists, many of which contain sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, signatures, birth dates, addresses, places of birth, party affiliation and voter history.

To date, the Justice Department has sued the District and the 30 states that have pushed back on the demands in full, including: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.

Federal judges in California, Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have dismissed the lawsuits, but the Justice Department has appealed the first three. Meanwhile, the government settled with Oklahoma and dismissed its suit there.

Meanwhile, 12 states have either provided or indicated they would provide their full statewide voter lists: Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which has tracked the Justice Department’s nationwide effort, those 12 states have received confidential memorandums of understanding that indicate the feds plan to review the lists and “cure” them of voters deemed ineligible if states themselves do not.

So far just Alaska and Texas have signed the agreements, while Mississippi, South Dakota and Tennessee refused to while handing over their voter rolls.

Nikhel Sus, chief counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and lead counsel on the case, said in a statement the Justice Department’s actions would upend the Constitution’s structure of national elections that puts states in charge.

“This effort to consolidate millions of Americans’ confidential voter data in a master federal database is part of a larger illegal scheme to take over states’ constitutional roles and federalize election administration,” Sus said. “The states’ responsibility for maintaining their voter rolls is enshrined in the Constitution and federal law, and we look forward to stopping this egregious overreach in court.”

According to Common Cause, the Department of Homeland Security “haphazardly” expanded its SAVE system, which was previously a limited tool for certain immigration-related databases, to conduct mass citizenship checks based on unreliable data.

“The faulty new system and flawed comparison methodology has already falsely identified significant numbers of U.S. citizens as noncitizens, imperiling their fundamental right to vote,” Common Cause said. “And the system has proven especially unreliable for citizens born outside of the United States (e.g., naturalized, derived and acquired citizens), who are at a higher risk of being falsely identified as noncitizens.”

Further, by centralizing over 340 million Americans’ sensitive data, the effort creates a target for hackers and foreign actors.

The Trump administration has maintained the national database is necessary to stamp out voter fraud, particularly in cases where noncitizens wrongfully vote in national elections.

On March 31, Trump signed an executive order, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” which aims to create lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters.

The order, which already faces several lawsuits of its own, comes as a major congressional bill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, has stalled in the Senate.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Follow @Ryan_Knappy