A federal appeals court on Wednesday handed the Trump administration its first appellate defeat in its campaign to force states to turn over unredacted voter rolls, affirming the dismissal of a Justice Department lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. The three-judge Sixth Circuit panel said the department could not use Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act to demand Michigan’s full voter registration file.
The fight mattered because the file was not a simple list. The department wanted names, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers, while Benson had given it only the public version of the list. That left the case centered on a sharp legal question: whether a law once used to protect voting rights could be turned around to pry open state election records.
Judge Andre Mathis said no. In his view, the government once used that power to make sure everyone with the right to vote could freely exercise it, but now was invoking Title III for the opposite purpose, to ensure that some people had not voted. The panel also said Michigan’s voter file is not the kind of record the department can demand under Title III because it is created and maintained by the state, not received from voters. Mathis wrote that an ordinary English speaker would not say she had come into possession of something she created, established and maintained, and therefore the qualified voter file did not come into Benson’s possession as that term is ordinarily understood.
That reasoning does more than settle one dispute in Michigan. Federal laws such as the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act require states to keep their rolls current, and the court warned that the Justice Department’s theory would put election officials in an impossible position. If the file had to be preserved as an untouched record for 22 months, states would be stuck between keeping the list current and freezing it in place. The panel’s ruling is also binding precedent for the department’s pending voter roll lawsuit in Kentucky, which makes a dismissal there hard to avoid under the same legal logic.
The decision leaves the department with no appellate win in the voter-roll litigation it has pursued so far. It has now lost ten decisions, including nine district court losses and this first one in the appeals court. A Trump-appointed district judge had already dismissed the Michigan case in February, and Wednesday’s ruling extends that loss into a precedent that will follow the department inside the same circuit. What remains open is not whether Michigan must hand over the unredacted file — the court answered that — but whether the Justice Department keeps pressing the same campaign elsewhere after this ruling closed off one of its clearest paths.
