A U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit seeking Virginia to hand over its voter rolls to the federal government has been tossed out by a federal judge.
The ruling yesterday (Tuesday) came from Judge Roderick Young, who President Donald Trump nominated in 2020 at the recommendation of Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. The ruling found that the Civil Rights Act does not require Virginia to provide the federal government with unredacted voter rolls.
Attorney General Jay Jones said the Trump administration’s demand for Virginia’s voter data had “no basis in law.”
“The court saw through the ploy and rejected their attempt to attack our electoral system,” Jones said in a statement. “We are proud of the secure, professional way elections are run in Virginia, and grateful to the attorneys in the Office of the Attorney General whose work stopped Trump’s partisan operatives from dragging our system into their campaign of chaos and distrust.”
The Trump administration’s DOJ had sued 30 states over not handing over voter registration records to the federal government. Of the cases with rulings so far, the DOJ has lost 15. Another 16 states have provided or committed to providing the feds with their voter rolls.
In explaining their push for the records, federal officials have said they need the voter data to ensure that states are complying with federal election laws related to maintaining voter registration lists, even though states already have detailed processes to do that. In the case out of Rhode Island, a Justice Department attorney acknowledged that the department was seeking unredacted voter roll information so it could be shared with the Department of Homeland Security to check citizenship status.
To register to vote in Virginia, a person must be a U.S. citizen and resident of Virginia who is 18 or older at the time of the next general election. Voters are required to bring an ID to their polling place, although it does not have to be a photo ID.
In the spring, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) ordered Virginia to return to the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, reversing a 2023 decision by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). The nonpartisan organization shares voter registration and identification data between 26 member states and D.C., helping to identify voters who have died, moved out of state, updated their contact information or had duplicate registrations in Virginia.
Spanberger had also ordered a limit on removing ineligible voters from the rolls to 90 days before a federal primary or general election. That applies this year to the congressional midterm primary in August and the general election in November.
Virginia recently reached a settlement in a lawsuit over the state’s voter roll purges weeks before the 2024 presidential election. The National Voter Registration Act requires that voter roll removals cannot happen within 90 days of a federal election.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
