EXCLUSIVE: The NVRA and HAVA Can Win the DOJ's Voter Roll Fight
The federal government has the tools to inspect voter rolls, but it will likely have to wait for the Supreme Court to use them.
This month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against 16 people in connection with illegal voting, illegal voter registration, and related election offenses. New Jersey drew scrutiny in July for thousands of noncitizen registrations and hundreds of noncitizen votes.
States with sloppy, bloated, and in some cases fraud-riddled voter rolls need federal oversight. The Department of Homeland Security has a moral and civic mandate to inspect states' voter rolls to catch ineligible names like those of dead voters, people who moved away, and noncitizens.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told Restoration News via email that the federal government already has the necessary legal mandate to do this and enforce corrections when states fail to maintain the rolls themselves properly. But recent court cases show that, thanks to activist liberal judges, concerned Americans will have to wait for the Supreme Court to rule before President Trump's administration can access these rolls and guarantee that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered to vote.
The NVRA and HAVA Are the Tools That Actually Win This Fight
The DOJ now stands at 0-for-24, out of 31 lawsuits filed nationwide, in federal district courts after a judge in Vermont became the latest to reject its demand for the state's voter data. Von Spakovsky said this is mainly due to judges' lack of understanding of federal law.
"I think it is a combination of three different things," he said regarding the DOJ's losing streak. "First, DOJ has been acting under provisions of the Civil Rights Act and not asserting additional claims under the [National Voter Registration Act] NVRA or [Help America Vote Act] HAVA."
As Restoration News has noted, the DOJ has relied extensively on the argument that the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1960 gives the DOJ the right to inspect the private information potential voters give their states when they register. The courts have disagreed, claiming the subsequent Privacy Act forbids it. Moreover, judges have argued that the CRA entitles the federal government only to the raw information individuals give their respective state registrars—not that same information these states store electronically in one location.
By contrast, the NVRA and HAVA specifically charge the Office of the Attorney General with enforcing list-maintenance obligations. Von Spakovsky contends that these laws give the DOJ all the ammunition it needs to win in court.
Von Spakovsky's diagnosis points to a course correction in argumentation that could win these cases. A department tasked with policing accuracy but denied the records needed to check it faces an impossible job.
Here, the key word is could. "Judges don't seem to understand that you can't enforce those provisions without access to state lists," he said.
Second, von Spakovsky added, "The DOJ is drawing politically biased judges who don't want to enforce these laws." His co-authored article with Daniel Mares for the Washington Examiner examines the rabid anti-Trump diatribes of District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of D.C. when she ruled that the administration cannot cross-reference immigration records with Social Security numbers.
Sooknanan's case dealt with a 2025 settlement in which the DOJ agreed to integrate the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database with the Social Security Administration to make it easier for states to verify if their voters were eligible. She ruled that this upgrade violated the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act.
Von Spakovsky contends that subsequent immigration statutes, which allow the sharing of this information, override those laws. In July, Judge T. Kent Wetherell II of the Northern District of Florida contradicted Sooknanan and ordered the Trump administration to enforce the 2025 rule.
Third, von Spakovsky said, "There is a split in the federal circuits over access to voter records in which a number of courts are misinterpreting the NVRA." Like the Sooknanan-Wetherell contradiction, this has created a bottleneck that the Supreme Court will have to untangle.
Voter Roll Transparency's Last Hope
Noncitizen registrations, like those uncovered in New Jersey, thrive because DHS is not allowed to use its vast resources to comb through states' registration lists and alert them to problems. This would, of course, embarrass many states that have sloppy rolls and force corrections, contradicting Democrats' claim that voter fraud is not a problem and their states' rolls are clean. But their refusal to simply turn over their rolls for federal inspection raises the more pressing question: whether they are trying to hide dirty rolls for partisan advantage.
One of these voter roll cases will inevitably make it to the Supreme Court—hopefully sooner rather than later—which will give the conservative majority the opportunity to let the federal government fulfill its obligations under the NVRA and HAVA. Until then, the DOJ must lean on the statutes written for exactly the purpose of voter roll inspection.
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