Sixth Circuit hands DOJ first appellate defeat in voter-roll fight, affirming Michigan dismissal

On June 24, 2026, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, handing the Trump Justice Department its first appellate-court loss in its campaign to force states to surrender unredacted voter rolls — including Social Security and driver’s license data. The DOJ has now lost every voter-roll case at both district and appellate levels, a 0-10 record. Its stated goal was to cross-reference rolls against DHS’s SAVE database to purge alleged noncitizens.

The structural significance lies in the convergence of two capture vectors: voter-data acquisition and the SAVE database, which has a documented history of misidentifying lawful citizens. Feeding error-prone immigration data into voter-purge machinery would produce wrongful disenfranchisement at scale; critics read the crusade as designed to manufacture election-integrity doubt ahead of the November 2026 midterms — a goal the DOJ partly served regardless of courtroom outcome, since the litigation itself seeds distrust. The appellate loss is a meaningful judicial check, but with roughly 29 state suits still active and a possible SCOTUS petition, the data-seizure effort is far from exhausted.