DOJ Voter-Data Campaign Reaches 31 Suits Against 30 States and DC as Trump-Appointed Judges Keep Ruling Against It

By April 6, 2026 the Justice Department had filed 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia, seeking court orders compelling them to hand over complete voter registration files including birthdates, partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers. States that refused the initial demand letters cited identity-theft exposure and state-law restrictions on bulk disclosure. Courts — including judges appointed by Trump — repeatedly ruled against the department. DOJ additionally threatened criminal charges against state election officials who declined to comply. Separately, voting-rights organizations sued DOJ to block construction of what they described as a national voter surveillance-and-purge database.

This is the scaling step of a campaign canon records from its origin. The demand letters went out in September 2025 with the centralized database as the stated destination (2025-09-09–doj-demands-voter-data-centralized-database); litigation began against six states in early December (2025-12-03–doj-sues-six-additional-states-voter-data) and stood at 18 states by December 12 (2025-12-12–doj-expands-voter-data-lawsuits-to-18-states). Four months later the count is 31 suits across 30 states and DC. The trajectory matters more than any single filing: a request that states could decline became litigation they must defend, in a volume that makes defending it a resource question for every state attorney general simultaneously.

The criminal-charge threat is the escalation this entry turns on. A civil suit over data disclosure puts the state in court. A threat to prosecute the individual official who refuses puts the secretary of state personally at risk for a decision made in their official capacity — which converts an intergovernmental legal dispute into personal jeopardy for the specific people positioned to say no. That is a pressure mechanism that operates whether or not the underlying suits succeed, and the suits have largely not been succeeding: adverse rulings came from judges across appointing administrations, Trump appointees included, which forecloses reading the losses as partisan judicial resistance.

The database, not the files, is the object. Protect Democracy’s countersuit frames the aggregation itself as the harm — 30-plus state voter rolls, joined on partial SSN and driver’s license number, produce a national voter file matched to identity documents, and a matched national file is the precondition for automated purge-list generation. Canon follows that thread forward: partial summary judgment for Common Cause in May (2026-05-19–common-cause-partial-summary-judgment-doj-national-voter-database), the ACLU’s NVRA blackout-deadline suit, filed April 21 (2026-04-24–aclu-common-cause-sue-doj-block-national-voter-database), the August tally of 12 states complied, 5 suits dismissed (2026-08-06–aclu-doj-voter-database-12-states-complied-5-suits-dismissed), and the September preservation letters carrying spoliation warnings to 29 states and DC (2026-09-10–doj-preservation-letters-29-states-dc-spoliation-warning). The August figure is the one that shows the strategy working without winning: partial compliance supplies partial data, and a database does not need every state to be useful.

Date note. 2026-04-06 is the date of the Ohio Capital Journal and New Republic reporting that establishes the 31-suit/30-state count and the criminal-charge threat. The individual suits were filed over the preceding months; this is the earliest confirmed date at which the campaign is documented at this scope, not the date of any single filing.

Open: the Wisconsin Law School tracker’s per-docket status (dismissals, appeals, any case reaching circuit level); state compliance posture cross-referenced against party control, since Republican-led states that refused would cut against the administration’s framing; and the technical architecture described in the Protect Democracy complaint, including any contractors named or implied — a question that connects directly to the SAVE-tool warnings in 2026-09-14–taylor-warns-save-tool-becoming-centralized-federal-voter-database.