Federal judge rejects Trump admin lawsuit seeking Michigan voter rolls

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit from the Trump administration seeking to acquire Michigan’s voter registration rolls.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee, is the latest in a string of legal losses over the acquisition of sensitive voter information. 

The Trump administration has sued multiple states over voter information in an effort to force them to clean up their voter lists. 

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Attorney General Pam Bondi argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gave her the power to compel states to turn over their lists. In a 23-page brief, Jarbou disagreed, saying the law applied to voter applications.

“If the distinction between voter registration applications and voter registration lists is overly pedantic, it is a pedantic distinction made by Congress, and it is Congress’s prerogative to make distinctions that may seem unnecessary to a person reading the statute over six decades after its passage, the judge wrote. “

“Needless to say, the existence of a statewide computerized voter list was not foreseeable to the Congress of 1960, and it is possible that legislators would have included such a list in the CRA’s disclosure provisions had they imagined the possibility,” Jarbou added. 

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The judge noted that the court is not a “telepathic time-traveler,” and thus it “cannot rewrite Congressional legislation to cover a situation that Congress may not have foreseen.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and Michigan officials for comment.

Since May 2025, the Trump administration has demanded nearly every state and Washington, D.C., hand over election-related records and data, such as full copies of statewide voter registration lists and ballots from previous elections, as well as access to voting equipment, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

The federal government maintains that it needs the records to make sure that states ensure accurate voter records and the removal of eligible voters to prevent fraud.