A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ's) lawsuit to obtain Michigan’s voter rolls, stating in her ruling that the department is not authorized to have the information.
The DOJ in September 2025 filed a lawsuit against the state after Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said she would not provide voter list maintenance information and the state's voter registration list to the government.
U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou wrote in her order that she would dismiss the DOJ's lawsuit, saying the state doesn't have to comply with the department's demands under federal election laws.
“There is simply no basis in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for the United States’s suggestion that it can file a HAVA [Help America Vote Act] claim, allege no violations of HAVA, and obtain information to support its (as-yet-nonexistent) claim via discovery,” Jarbou wrote.
A reading of a statute of the U.S. Code also "suggests that it requires states to disclose information regarding the process by which they maintain their voter registration list but not the list itself. Perhaps this result seems odd, but this oddity disappears when one considers that state voter registration lists were often already subject to public disclosure under state law when the NVRA was enacted," she added.
Further, the judge wrote that the law applies to voter applications themselves, not to lists maintained by the states that compile voter registrations.
“If the distinction between voter registration applications and voter registration lists is overly pedantic, it is a pedantic distinction made by Congress, and it is Congress’s prerogative to make distinctions that may seem unnecessary to a person reading the statute over six decades after its passage,” she said in the order.
The ruling by Jarbou follows orders by judges in Oregon and California who have barred the DOJ's bids to obtain voter records from those two states, as congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have warned that the DOJ's lawsuits are attempts by the Trump administration to obtain more control over elections.
“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data,” Carter said in mid-January. “This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation.”
In September, the DOJ announced it would file lawsuits in Michigan, California, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania over the states' voter registration lists and suggested the states are not maintaining clean lists.
“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement at the time.
“Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure—states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.”
The DOJ has filed lawsuits against at least 23 states and the District of Columbia as part of its effort to collect such data. The department has said it needs access to detailed voter data to ensure election officials comply with federal election laws.
The Epoch Times contacted Benson's office for comment on Tuesday but did not receive a response by publication time.