Federal judge dismisses Justice Department lawsuit seeking West Virginia's unredacted voter data

A federal judge in Charleston has dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuit demanding that West Virginia hand over its full, unredacted list of registered voters, ruling that the government did not give a factual basis for the request.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston, an appointee of President George W. Bush, entered the order Monday in the Southern District of West Virginia. He wrote that the Attorney General cannot use broad records demands to run "fishing expeditions" into sensitive personal data without a clear connection to protecting the right to vote.

The department had asked the court to force Secretary of State Kris Warner to produce a copy of the statewide voter file containing voters' full names, residential addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. It sued West Virginia in February after the state declined two requests for the records.

What the department argued

The Justice Department sought the data under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, saying it needed the records to check whether the state was complying with federal election law, including requirements to maintain accurate voter lists.

Johnston found that reasoning insufficient. Quoting the order, Warner's office said the department's "demand includes no indication that West Virginia is suspected to be noncompliant with the list maintenance requirements of [federal law], nor does it point to any anomalies in West Virginia's voter registration data."

In a footnote, the judge went further. "Given the lack of an adequate basis or purpose, one is left to wonder what the real purpose was for the Justice Department to go to the trouble of filing civil actions like this one all around the nation," he wrote. "Troubling though this question is, it is not before the Court at this time."

Lawyers for West Virginia had argued the request was legally deficient and served a purpose tied to immigration enforcement rather than voting rights. The state also argued that its voter list is an internally created database exempt from federal production.

The state's response

Warner, a Republican, called the ruling "an important victory for the rule of law, voter privacy, and the dedicated election officials across West Virginia." He said his office had held from the start that state law bars release of the data without legal authority requiring it.

A run of dismissals

The West Virginia decision follows the dismissal of similar Justice Department suits elsewhere. WV MetroNews reported that federal district courts have thrown out the department's cases in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Maine, Wisconsin, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. By the count of Democracy Docket, a group tracking the litigation, the West Virginia ruling is the department's 13th consecutive loss in the effort. In June, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to weigh in, upholding the dismissal of the suit against Michigan.

The department has demanded voter data from at least 47 states, according to WV MetroNews, and sued about 30 of them after they refused, part of an effort to expand federal oversight of election records that states have historically run.

The Justice Department has not publicly commented on the West Virginia ruling. It has appealed similar dismissals in other states.