Federal courts have dismissed the Trump administration’s voter data lawsuits in six states, and a Trump-appointed judge threw out the Arizona case with prejudice just three days ago — leaving the Colorado lawsuit pending before U.S. District Court Chief Judge Philip A. Brimmer with a legal foundation that has repeatedly failed in other jurisdictions.
The Justice Department sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on December 11, 2025, seeking unredacted voter registration data including driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers for every registered voter in the state. The DOJ filed identical suits against 30 states and Washington, D.C., arguing federal election statutes — including the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act — require states to turn over the records. Colorado had already provided publicly available voter data in response to an earlier DOJ demand in May 2025. Griswold declined only to release the non-public fields.
Courts in California, Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Arizona have since rejected the DOJ’s legal theory. On April 28, U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich — a Trump appointee — dismissed the Arizona case with prejudice, writing that Arizona’s voter registration list is “not a document subject to request by the Attorney General” under federal law, and that amendment would be “legally futile.” In Rhode Island, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy called the DOJ’s demand “unprecedented” and found the department lacked authority to conduct “the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.” Judges in Massachusetts and Michigan reached similar conclusions on different procedural grounds.
The DOJ is appealing the dismissals in California, Michigan, and Oregon. Oral argument in the Oregon case before the Ninth Circuit is scheduled for May 19. How appellate courts rule on those cases could reshape the legal landscape for the Colorado litigation and the remaining active suits.
In Colorado, the state is fighting the lawsuit on privacy grounds. Griswold, who is running for state attorney general, said in December that she would not “hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump.” State Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office is representing Griswold, said he would not be “bullied” by what he called the DOJ’s “lawless actions.” The federal government asked the court to compel production of the data within five days of any court order.
The DOJ’s stated purpose in collecting the data is to verify that voter rolls are accurate and to cross-reference registrations against federal immigration databases. During a March 2026 hearing in the Rhode Island case, a DOJ attorney said the department planned to run collected voter data against the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — the SAVE database — to flag potentially ineligible voters for removal. On April 21, Common Cause and several individuals filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., seeking to block the creation of what they characterized as a national voter database and to prevent voter data from being processed through the SAVE program.
The SAVE database question has a parallel in Colorado. North Carolina’s State Board of Elections found approximately 34,000 deceased people still on its voter rolls after cross-referencing its records against the SAVE database during a citizenship verification effort — the same type of federal database check the DOJ is trying to compel in Colorado. Colorado has conducted its own list maintenance: a 2023 Judicial Watch settlement removed 372,000 inactive registrations, and the Secretary of State’s office runs continuous checks against state death records, driver’s license data, and a multistate voter tracking program. The state has not run a SAVE database cross-check against its full voter file. Whether such a check would find similar discrepancies to North Carolina’s remains unknown.
No ruling has been issued in the Colorado case. The case is United States v. Griswold, Case No. 1:25-cv-03967, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
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