Appeals court rules Michigan doesn’t have to hand over sensitive voter data

Michigan is not obligated to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court decided on Wednesday.

A divided three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act does not authorize the Justice Department to compel the state to provide its unredacted voter roll, which contains the dates of birth, partial social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of every registered voter in the state.

Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee, authored the majority opinion. He was joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee.

Judge John Nalbandian, who was nominated by President Trump in his first term, dissented.

The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to force compliance with its demand, but those efforts have been repeatedly rejected at the district court level. Its cases against California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine and Maryland have also been dismissed.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) provided the Trump administration with the public version of Michigan’s statewide registered voter list but refused to turn over any additional data, arguing that the Trump administration did not have the authority to seek those records.

A lower court agreed, with District Judge Hala Jarbou finding that the Justice Department’s demand was not authorized by Title III, as it claimed. The administration appealed.

The civil rights law provision requires states to retain election records for 22 months after a federal election and give them to the federal government for inspection, but only if the attorney general specifies the “basis and purpose” of its request.

The appeals court determined that did not happen in this case, so Benson was not required to submit the unredacted records.

Mathis also noted that Title III was designed to empower the attorney general to investigate allegations of voting discrimination, not to disenfranchise potential voters.

“Back then, the government used this power to ensure that everyone who had the right to vote could freely exercise that right,” Mathis wrote for the majority. “But today, the government invokes Title III for an inverse purpose — to ensure that some people have not voted.”

The ruling comes as the latest blow to Trump’s effort to exert greater control over federal elections ahead of the November midterms, in which Republicans are hoping to cling to their narrow majority in the House.

The administration has contended that it needs access to every state’s voter registration lists to ensure that only eligible U.S. citizens are voting, an argument that coincides with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Some states have voluntarily handed over that data, while others have resisted.