Federal Judge Dismisses DOJ's Minnesota Voter-Roll Suit as a 'Fishing Expedition,' Pushing the Department to 0-23 in Court

A federal judge in Minnesota dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking the state’s unredacted voter rolls on August 17, 2026, characterizing the demand as a “fishing expedition” with no statutory basis under either the Civil Rights Act of 1960 or the Help America Vote Act. The ruling brought DOJ’s record in voter-roll litigation to 0-23. The Department has sued 30 states plus the District of Columbia.

The litigation scoreboard understates what the campaign has actually achieved. Twelve or more states have voluntarily surrendered voter data without any court order, which means a national voter database is being assembled outside the process that keeps producing losses — the courts block the coercive path while the cooperative path stays open and unlitigated. This is the pattern already visible in the corpus: DOJ secret voter-file agreements covering 37 million voters (2026-02-17–doj-secret-voter-file-agreements-37-million-voters), the ACLU’s finding that 12 states complied while five suits were dismissed (2026-08-06–aclu-doj-voter-database-12-states-complied-5-suits-dismissed), a first appellate loss in Michigan (2026-06-24–sixth-circuit-doj-first-appellate-loss-voter-rolls-michigan), and a Colorado dismissal with prejudice (2026-08-04–doj-voter-roll-colorado-dismissed-with-prejudice-dc-dismissed). Minnesota is also where Bondi explicitly tied voter-roll demands to ICE enforcement tensions in January (2026-01-26–bondi-voter-rolls-request-minnesota-ice-enforcement) — the same state where HSI ran Operation Puppet Master against the anti-ICE community. Losing 23 consecutive cases is only a defeat if the lawsuits were the point.