PHOENIX (LN) — A federal judge in Arizona on Monday dismissed the Justice Department's Title III enforcement action against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, holding that the state's statewide voter registration list is not the kind of document the Civil Rights Act of 1960 entitles the Attorney General to demand — the sixth consecutive court to reach that conclusion since January.
According to the complaint, the DOJ sued Fontes after he refused to hand over Arizona's statewide voter registration list, which the complaint alleges contains each registered voter's full name, date of birth, residential address, and either a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. The Attorney General argued the list fell within Title III's requirement that states preserve and produce "all records and papers which come into [their] possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting" in federal elections.
The court rejected that reading, adopting the reasoning of a February ruling out of the Western District of Michigan in United States v. Benson. The key phrase, the court held, is "come into his possession" — language that refers only to documents election officials receive from prospective voters, not records the state itself creates.
The court adopted Benson's conclusion that the phrase refers to a process by which someone acquires an item from an external source, and that a voter registration list, by contrast, is assembled by state officials, updated with data from the Social Security Administration and other states, and includes voting histories that never appear on any individual application.
The court also held that reading the voter registration list into Title III would create an irreconcilable conflict with two other federal statutes. The National Voter Registration Act allows states to develop a program to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters, and the Help America Vote Act requires states to "perform list maintenance with respect to the computerized list on a regular basis." If the voter registration list were a Title III document, the court reasoned, the Civil Rights Act's separate provision making it a crime for "any person" to "alter" such a document would prohibit the very maintenance Congress elsewhere mandated.
The court was unpersuaded by the DOJ's argument that Benson "reached a few atextual conclusions" and "read [Section 20701] narrower than Congress intended." The court noted that Benson is only a few months old and was among the first courts to squarely address whether voter registration lists fall within Title III's scope — meaning the absence of contrary precedent reflects the novelty of the question, not a consensus against Benson's logic.
The court also pushed back on the DOJ's invocation of cases interpreting the NVRA broadly. "There is no canon of statutory construction which requires this Court to construe Title III broadly merely because it pertains to election records," the order states. The court added that the NVRA's statutory language is "too dissimilar to be of any real value in interpreting the text of § 20701."
The case drew an unusually wide field of amici. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia filed in support of Fontes, as did the ACLU, the Democratic National Committee, the Brennan Center for Justice, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Campaign Legal Center, among others.
The court dismissed the case with prejudice, concluding that amendment would be "legally futile."
The Justice Department sued twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia seeking voter registration lists, and courts in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island had already dismissed identical actions before Monday's ruling.