(The Hill) — The Justice Department (DOJ) on Friday targeted four states for refusing to turn over voter data and issued a complaint against Georgia’s Fulton County for information related to the 2020 presidential election.
The Trump administration’s lawsuit against Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Nevada accused the states of withholding private data about registered voters, including citizenship status.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in a statement.
“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” she continued. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, California, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Oregon and Pennsylvania also face lawsuits for withholding voter data.
State leaders say they are legally obligated to conceal documents with personally identifiable information such as voters’ names, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers.
Leaders in Washington State and New Mexico say they provided federal authorities with public voter registration data but are still facing legal scrutiny from the DOJ.
“We will not hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump. He does not have a legal right to the information,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) said Thursday after the lawsuit was filed, according to The Associated Press.
The records request coincides with the DOJ’s complaint against Fulton County.
Federal officials are requesting “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County” to investigate “compliance with federal law.”
The latest lawsuits come almost a month after Peter Skandalakis, the executive director of Georgia’s Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council (PAC), was named to take over Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s (D) election interference case against President Trump.
The president and more than a dozen of his allies were indicted in August 2023 for allegedly entering a conspiracy to overturn former President Biden’s 2020 victory in the Peach State. Trump and several of his co-defendants have denied the allegations.
The case was dismissed last month after Skandalakis announced he would not move forward.
In his 22-page decision, the prosecutor said it should have been pursued in federal court, not at the state level. Willis was booted from the case after her relationship with a top prosecutor was brought to light.
Now, Trump is preparing a bid to recover millions of dollars in attorney’s fees over the failed litigation.