When the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Kentucky for its voter registration records last month, it offered the same reason for wanting the information as it did in the 29 other, nearly identical lawsuits demanding states’ voter rolls.
The unredacted data, including social security numbers and birth dates, was necessary to “ascertain compliance with the list maintenance requirements of the [National Voting Registration Act] NVRA and [Help America Votes Act] HAVA.”
In other words, the DOJ needed the information to ensure that Kentucky was purging its voter rolls aggressively enough to satisfy President Donald Trump’s administration.
But just last year, Kentucky faced another lawsuit under the NVRA, this one from a civil rights group suing the state for purging its voter rolls too aggressively — and the DOJ intervened on Kentucky’s behalf, saying that they weren’t.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth argued that the state’s registration roll maintenance procedures were too broad, violating the NVRA’s voters’ protections. The DOJ intervened to say that Kentucky’s state law was fully compliant with the federal statute. Kentucky’s law “has lawful applications, and this facial challenge fails,” the DOJ’s statement of interest concluded.
Moreover, before that lawsuit — which is still pending — was filed, the DOJ and Kentucky entered into a consent decree along with the anti-voting advocacy group Judicial Watch in 2018 after it sued the state, arguing that Kentucky was not purging the voter rolls aggressively enough. That consent decree, which expired last March without any party objecting or attempting to extend it, required Kentucky to remove ineligible voters pursuant to the NVRA and state law. Over the course of the consent decree, Kentucky removed roughly 735,000 ineligible registrations.
Kentucky’s lawyers highlighted the federal government’s role reversal in a filing Tuesday asking the federal district court to dismiss the DOJ’s lawsuit.
“The Department does not identify any information suggesting noncompliance. It does not allege any irregularities. It does not claim to have received any complaints. It does not assert that Kentucky’s list-maintenance program is deficient,” Kentucky wrote. “Nor could it.”
“The Department did not object to the decree’s expiration. Nor did it claim noncompliance,” Kentucky’s filing continued. “To the contrary, the Department’s position shifted: having sued the Board under the NVRA years earlier, it later supported the Board in litigation filed in 2025 in which it defended the Board’s list maintenance efforts as fully consistent with the NVRA. When the Board was challenged for removing ineligible registrants under KRS 116.113(5), the Department took the remarkable step of filing a statement of interest in the Board’s favor.”
This isn’t the first time the DOJ’s attempt to secure unfettered access to voter rolls has led it to reverse itself. In its litigation filings, the agency has sworn to judges it merely wants to ensure states are complying with federal registration roll maintenance requirements, while admitting elsewhere that it is using the information to help the administration’s hunt for undocumented immigrants.* So far, the administration has lost three cases and had a fourth dismissed without prejudice for being filed in the wrong jurisdiction (the DOJ since refiled).
*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias’s law firm, Elias Law Group, represents intervening defendants in many of these lawsuits.
Maya Bodison contributed to this report.