Arizona Judge Rejects DOJ Bid to Obtain Statewide Voter Rolls Under 1960 Civil Rights Law, Becoming Sixth Court to Rule Against Government

PHOENIX (LN) — A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to compel Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to turn over the state's complete voter registration list, ruling that the 66-year-old Civil Rights Act provision the DOJ invoked does not reach records that state officials create — only those that voters submit to the state in the first place.

The case turned on a narrow but consequential question of statutory interpretation: whether Arizona's statewide voter registration list qualifies as a document "which come[s] into [the state's] possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting" under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, 52 U.S.C. § 20701. The court held that it does not.

The Attorney General had demanded the list — which the complaint alleged contains each registered voter's full name, date of birth, residential address, driver's license number, and the last four digits of their Social Security number — as part of what the complaint described as an investigation into Arizona compliance with federal election law, specifically the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. Fontes refused, citing state and federal privacy laws.

The court adopted the reasoning of United States v. Benson, a February decision out of the Western District of Michigan, which held that a voter registration list is "created by state officials" and is not a document "that people submit to the State as part of the voter registration process." The phrase "come into his possession," the Michigan court held, "refer[s] to only those documents that state election officials receive from prospective voters" — a reading the Arizona court called persuasive and adopted in full.

The court also held that treating the voter registration list as a Title III document would create an irreconcilable conflict with both the NVRA and HAVA, each of which affirmatively requires states to update and maintain their voter rolls. Section 20702 of Title III makes it a crime for any person to "willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter" a covered document. If the voter registration list were covered, the court reasoned, routine list maintenance mandated by federal law would become a federal crime.

The Benson court had written that "nothing in the CRA's text implies an intent to require states to preserve every election-related record that they create," reasoning the Arizona court found persuasive and adopted.

The court pushed back on each of the DOJ's counterarguments. The government contended that courts have historically read Title III's coverage broadly and that Benson reached a few atextual conclusions and read the statute narrower than Congress intended, and that no other federal court had adopted such a limitation. The court was unimpressed, noting that Benson is only a few months old and was among the first decisions to squarely address whether voter registration lists fall within Section 20701's scope. The court also rejected the DOJ's reliance on NVRA cases construing election records expansively, finding the statutory language too dissimilar to carry weight in interpreting Title III.

The court dismissed the case with prejudice, holding that amendment would be legally futile.

The Justice Department sued 29 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter registration lists, and as of the date of the order, courts in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island had already dismissed parallel suits — making Arizona the sixth dismissal the government had suffered in these cases.