A federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration’s attempt to obtain Illinois’ unredacted voter registration list, ruling that the Department of Justice lacked authority under the law it invoked.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless issued the 14-page decision on Friday, July 31, granting motions to dismiss filed by Illinois election official Bernadette Matthews and several intervening groups. The court also denied the DOJ’s motion to compel production of the records and dismissed the case with prejudice.
Matthews serves as executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections. The Justice Department filed its case in December 2025 after she declined to provide an unredacted list containing voters’ dates of birth, driver’s licence or state identification numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. Illinois had previously supplied a redacted version.
The DOJ relied on Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, arguing that the records were needed to assess Illinois’ compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
Lawless rejected that interpretation, writing, “[T]he Court finds Title III does not provide the Attorney General with the authority to compel production of the unredacted voter registration list, and the written demand was deficient as a matter of law.”
The judge found that Title III applies to election-related records obtained by an official, rather than a statewide list created and maintained by the election board itself.
“If Congress had meant ‘come into possession’ to simply mean any record existing within the election official’s ‘possession,’ it would not have chosen to include the ostensibly extraneous language,” the judge wrote.
The court also concluded that the DOJ’s written demand failed to provide an adequate factual basis or a legitimate purpose under Title III.
“Dismissal is additionally warranted because the Attorney General’s written demand did not include both a sufficient basis and legitimate purpose for requesting the unredacted voter registration list,” the opinion states.
The Illinois case forms part of a nationwide Justice Department campaign to obtain complete voter files from state officials. The ruling said the DOJ had brought similar cases against officials in 30 other states and Washington, D.C. It also noted that 18 district courts had dismissed comparable lawsuits before the Illinois decision.
Voting rights organisations welcomed the outcome. The ACLU described the Illinois ruling as the 19th consecutive federal court decision rejecting the DOJ’s efforts to obtain unredacted state voter rolls.
“This ruling is another decisive rejection of the federal government’s attempts to bypass its limits of power,” Ethan Herenstein, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project said in a press release. “The Trump administration cannot manufacture a voter fraud crisis to justify a sweeping up of sensitive personal information from millions of Americans.”