ACLU Suit Against DOJ National Voter Database Proceeds as 12 States Comply Voluntarily, Courts Dismiss 5 State Challenges

The ACLU and Protect Democracy’s suit on behalf of Common Cause and four individual voters to block DOJ’s national voter surveillance-and-purge database is proceeding toward a ruling, with new numbers clarifying the fight’s scope: of all 50 states DOJ demanded confidential voter data from, 12 have complied voluntarily, while federal courts in Michigan, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have dismissed DOJ’s own suits seeking to compel data from resistant states. Competing summary-judgment motions — plaintiffs filed May 19, DOJ’s counter-motion June 2 — remain pending, with a ruling likely before the November 2026 midterms. The Department has sued thirty states to compel handover (one August tally puts the figure at thirty-one, a discrepancy worth reconciling against the primary docket); the plaintiff coalition, initially the ACLU and Protect Democracy on behalf of Common Cause and four individual voters, was reported in mid-August as also including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

This is a status update on the suit this corpus first captured at filing (2026-07-15–aclu-sues-doj-national-voter-database-nvra-blackout-deadline), following the broader DOJ voter-data campaign that began with 18-state lawsuits demanding Social Security numbers and driver’s license data (2025-12-12–doj-expands-voter-data-lawsuits-to-18-states) and the Sixth Circuit’s first appellate loss for DOJ on Michigan voter rolls (2026-06-24–sixth-circuit-doj-first-appellate-loss-voter-rolls-michigan). The 12-complied/5-dismissed split maps a genuine partisan and judicial fault line months ahead of the midterms this database could be used to influence. The litigation record has since run to 0-23 against the Department (2026-08-17–minnesota-judge-dismisses-doj-voter-roll-suit-fishing-expedition-0-23), including a with-prejudice dismissal in Colorado (2026-08-04–doj-voter-roll-colorado-dismissed-with-prejudice-dc-dismissed) and a 0-9 dismissal by a Trump appointee in Maryland (2026-06-23–doj-voter-roll-maryland-dismissed-0-9-trump-appointee) — a near-total losing streak that has not slowed the database, because the aggregation half never depended on winning the compulsion half: the twelve voluntary compliances came from request letters, not court orders (2025-09-09–doj-demands-voter-data-centralized-database). One caution against reading the losing streak as the whole story: Bloomberg Law reported in August that the Department has secured appellate wins pointing toward a Supreme Court test, so the district-court tally is not by itself evidence of where the question ends up.

Correction: the figure is eighteen, and they are named (added 2026-08-27)

The “12 complied” figure in this entry is superseded. It came from an August 6, 2026 ACLU press release — a secondary summary, not a filing — and this entry correctly noted the twelve were unnamed.

The primary filing names eighteen. Common Cause’s Memorandum of Law in Support of Plaintiffs’ Motion for Partial Summary Judgment (filed 2026-05-19, ECF No. 29-1, Common Cause v. DOJ, No. 1:26-cv-01352 (D.D.C.)) identifies eighteen “Complying States,” each backed by a specific administrative-record document citation — DOJ’s own certified record, not an advocacy count:

“at least 18 states from acquiescing to DOJ’s data demands, including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming (the ‘Complying States’).”

One entry is contested in the record and should be cited with that caveat: DOJ represented in court that Kansas provided data including partial Social Security numbers; Kansas’s Secretary of State publicly denied sharing that category (The Beacon, 2026-03-20). The brief still cites a Kansas administrative-record document.

The compulsion-versus-compliance asymmetry the entry describes holds and sharpens: DOJ’s litigation record is 0-23, and eighteen states handed the data over without being ordered to. The database does not depend on winning.

Full working: research-doj-voter-database-compliant-states-and-docket-2026-08-27.