The US Justice Department isn’t entitled to Pennsylvania’s unredacted voter rolls, a federal judge ruled in the latest defeat for the Trump administration on the issue.
“Unredacted voter files are not ‘records,’ as the term is defined under” the Civil Rights Act of 1960, said Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon of the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as she dismissed the suit with prejudice.
It’s the administration’s tenth loss in federal district court in its quest to obtain all 50 states’ unredacted voter rolls. While some Republican-led states handed over their records, the administration sued 30 states to get their rolls, according to a litigation tracker maintained by the University of Wisconsin law school’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Bissoon’s Saturday ruling relied heavily on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s recent ruling in United States v. Benson, the first voter roll case to be decided at the appellate level. In that ruling, the 2-1 panel said the Justice Department wasn’t entitled to Michigan’s voter rolls.
Since the files are not records, “the government’s reading does violence to” the Civil Rights Act, Bissoon said. “Tortured statutory construction tends to yield such a result.”
The government also failed to demonstrate its entitlement to the rolls under complying with the National Voter Registration Act or Help America Vote Act, Bissoon said.
“Public statements from government officials reveal its intentions: to create a nationwide voter-database, for potential weaponization in future elections; as a ‘fishing expedition,’ hoped to advance unsubstantiated claims of non-citizen voting; and as a tool for immigration enforcement,” she said.
Neither the Justice Department nor the office of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt immediately responded to requests for comment.
The case is United States v. Schmidt, W.D. Pa., No. 25-cv-1481, order 6/27/26.