The Trump Administration’s Astonishing Losing Record on Voter Rolls

T ypically, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division focuses its voting-rights efforts on ensuring that Americans are free to cast a ballot.

Under the second Trump administration, the division has trained its focus on a different project: strong-arming states to hand over sensitive voter information to the federal government.

Since September 2025, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia to this effect.

“This is a top priority,” the division’s head, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, said on a podcast hosted by the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson last December.

Examining these records would help DOJ identify supposed voting by noncitizens and stamp out voter fraud, Dhillon explained: “I think eventually we’re going to win these cases, all of them.” DOJ had never before sought to collect these data, and the ominous ambiguity as to what the government plans to do with the information left many experts and election officials alarmed over how this might be used to interfere with the midterm elections.

In a letter to the Justice Department, a group of Democratic secretaries of state voiced “immense concern” over DOJ’s apparent plans to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security.

Nearly a year later, however, the number of victories secured by the Justice Department in this litigation stands at zero.

DOJ has lost 26 cases in district court and triumphed in none; Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, in Washington, D.C., handed the administration its latest defeat just last Friday. (Several cases remain pending.) The administration’s demands have been rejected by judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans—including several nominated by President Trump himself—a run of losses that represents an embarrassing defeat for Dhillon’s project.

More important than humiliation: DOJ’s wipeout demonstrates how America’s decentralized system of elections, aided by the courts, is working to limit Trump’s efforts to corrupt democracy.

Anxious narratives about his administration interfering with elections often portray the president as a figure who “can just will his fantasies into existence,” says Justin Levitt, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.

But the Justice Department’s prolonged losing streak, Levitt told me, “is a pretty clean rebuttal” of Trump’s supposed invincibility.

E lections in the United States are conducted at the state and local levels, and the federal government has little involvement or control over how officials across the country manage the voting process.