Civil Rights Act of 1960

In its 2026 application, the Trump Department of Justice invoked the Act, principally Title III, as the statutory basis for demanding statewide voter-roll data from more than 30 states and the District of Columbia. The Act became the DOJ's sole surviving statutory theory in this litigation after the Department dropped its NVRA and HAVA claims across its remaining active cases, narrowing a 47-state dragnet to a single 66-year-old statute.

A Massachusetts court dismissed the first DOJ suit on 9 April 2026 on the ground that the demand failed to state its legal basis; the reasoning proved portable, and courts in Wisconsin and Maine dismissed on the same logic on 21 May, bringing the total to eight dismissals (California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Maine) by mid-June, out of roughly 30 states originally targeted. The DOJ appealed all eight losses rather than refile, consolidating a scattered defensive position into a single appellate wager on the 9th and 6th Circuits, which had heard the Oregon and Michigan appeals on 19 and 13 May respectively.

That wager produced its first result on 24 June, when a Sixth Circuit panel affirmed the Michigan dismissal 2-1 in United States v. Benson, the first circuit-level ruling anywhere in the fight. The majority held that Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 cannot support a demand for every voter's date of birth, partial Social Security number, and driving-licence number, writing that the DOJ was invoking a statute written to help investigate vote suppression 'for an inverse purpose, to ensure that some people have not voted.' The ruling binds Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Rather than accept the loss, the DOJ petitioned the full Sixth Circuit for rehearing en banc on 8 July, seeking to revive the Michigan demand before the panel's reasoning could harden into circuit precedent; the 9th Circuit's own ruling on the Oregon appeal remains pending and will now be read against whatever the en banc court decides.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 is a federal statute enacted during the Eisenhower administration that granted the federal government authority to inspect local voter registration records. Passed in response to Southern states' systematic exclusion of Black voters, it predates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and originally functioned as an enforcement tool against discriminatory registration practices, principally through Title III, which lets the DOJ inspect local voting records.