It’s almost like it’s routine now. A federal judge throws out a lawsuit from the Department of Justice that asked a state to give them unredacted voter rolls. The DOJ is upset and says it will file an appeal. The lawyer general for the state says it’s a privacy win. After that, everyone moves on until the next ruling in the next state follows the same pattern.
That’s exactly what happened when District Judge Zahid Quraishi threw out the DOJ’s lawsuit against New Jersey on Wednesday. He also turned down the federal government’s request to see full voter registration data that includes driver’s license and Social Security numbers. Biden chose Quraishi to be the judge, and he said that Title III of the Civil Rights Act does not cover the kind of computerized voter registration list that New Jersey uses. A lot of federal judges now agree on this interpretation of the law.
The DOJ lawsuit over the NJ voter rolls was never happening by itself. About 30 states have been sued in a similar way by the Trump administration, which says it has the legal right to see all voter records as part of what it calls “election oversight.” New Jersey hadn’t flatly refused; the state’s Division of Elections did give them voter information, but they took out personal information that could be used to find them. The courts keep saying that difference is important.
After the decision, Jennifer Davenport, the attorney general of New Jersey, made it clear: seventeen district courts and one federal appeals court have now all agreed with the defendants and rejected the federal government’s position. Democracy Docket, which has been closely following the cases, says that there have been zero wins out of eighteen in district court. If judges appointed by presidents of both parties keep ruling against the same legal theory, it’s hard not to think that the theory has a structural flaw that appeals won’t be able to easily fix.
Still, this is not a clean political situation. Last week, Governor Mikie Sherrill said that a mistake at the Motor Vehicle Commission had allowed about 6,600 noncitizens to register to vote between 2023 and 2024. Of those, about 400 actually voted in at least one election afterward. The news was quickly picked up by the Trump administration, which used it as proof of the kind of fraud it has long said happens in states run by Democrats. During a prime-time address earlier this month, the president said that 35,152 noncitizens were registered in New Jersey. However, the state has said that this number is not accurate.
It’s still not clear how much of a problem that difference will be fixed. Sherrill admitted there was a mistake, said it was caused by a software glitch, and said her administration is fixing it. But she has also firmly refused to allow the federal government to see the underlying data on those people. Just this week, she officially turned down a DOJ request in this area. The lawsuit that was thrown out on Wednesday is not related to that fight; the voter roll lawsuit happened months before last week’s disclosure; however, the two have become politically intertwined in ways that make them hard to talk about separately.
The bigger question that lies beneath all of this is harder to separate. Is the federal government really trying to make sure that elections are fair, or is it just using lawsuits to put pressure on states and make news that is good for politics? As we watch this unfold, it seems like both things could be true at the same time. This doesn’t mean that either the DOJ or the states is completely wrong or completely right.
