Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice

Following President Trump’s calls to take over election administration, the Department of Justice has initiated a sweeping effort to consolidate voter data from all fifty states and Washington, D.C. Many states have resisted those efforts and refused to turn over voters’ information—and have been sued by the Department of Justice. ACLU has since intervened on the side of those states, to help protect the rights of voters.

But at least a dozen states are complying with the Department of Justice’s unlawful demands and have turned over their voters’ information. Those states include Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.

The Department of Justice is legally required to disclose to the public what it intends to do with that sensitive information and offer an opportunity for the public to weigh in—and it has failed to do so. Instead, the federal government appears to be moving forward with an unreliable process to identify alleged voter fraud—a process that is likely to misidentify U.S. citizens as being ineligible to vote—and to force states to cancel their voter registrations.

Crucially, Congress has never authorized the federal government to control the state-run voter registration process in this manner. If this unlawful process continues unchecked, U.S. citizens who have already proven their eligibility to vote may suddenly find that their registration is no longer active and that they are unable to cast a ballot.

The ACLU—along with its partners ACLU DC, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Protect Democracy, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School—has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Common Cause and individual voters to stop the Department of Justice’s unauthorized intrusion into election administration and voters’ private data.

The case was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, on April 21, 2026.