In its relentless pursuit of unredacted voter rolls from the states, the Department of Justice has taken another stinging rebuke. A federal court in Delaware has handed the Trump administration its 28th consecutive loss.
This is the most recent in a line of judicial rejections of the administration’s attempts to meddle with the constitutional authority of the states over election administration. The DOJ has not won any of its lawsuits on the matter, and this is the last to be decided; cases in Hawaii and Idaho are on hold for a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, according to Democracy Docket.
The defeat in Delaware comes in the wake of last week’s blue wave election that saw Democrats turn over seats in red territory, including Texas, North Carolina and Georgia. In an effort to substantiate its claim of noncitizen registration, the Trump administration had put forward baseless charges of extensive voting by noncitizens as a cornerstone of its election strategy and called for state voter rolls.
Yet no federal district court or the one appeals court to have opined on it has been swayed by the DOJ’s contention that the Civil Rights Act’s record-keeping provisions give it access to the states’ voter logs with their sensitive data like Social Security numbers. U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews, a Barack Obama appointee, concurred.
“I agree with the Sixth Circuit and other district courts,” wrote Andrews, “that have determined that reading the demand provision of Title III to apply to documents received from third-party sources, rather than internally created documents, prevents conflict between” the Civil Rights Act and other statutes such as the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
In August 2025, the DOJ demanded Delaware’s full voter list, including birth dates and driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers, within seven days. Delaware Election Commissioner Anthony Albence refused.
Andrews ruled that the list, which Delaware officials built themselves, never “came into” Albence’s possession as the statute requires. The DOJ “is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” he wrote, applying a law written for paper records to ever-changing electronic databases. Poll taxes, he added, have “gone the way of the dodo bird.”
He also dismissed a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion as unhelpful and noted that voters’ names, addresses, party affiliations and voting histories are already public in Delaware. The DOJ, he wrote, “has the tools” to check for ineligible voters.
The DOJ has until Thursday to seek Supreme Court review of the 6th Circuit’s ruling.
