A federal court in Kentucky dismissed the Department of Justice (DOJ)'s suit for the state's voter file on 23 July, the seventeenth such dismissal since the programme began. The department filed a notice of appeal against a separate loss the same day, in Connecticut, where its case had been thrown out on 17 July. DOJ has sued 30 states and Washington DC, 31 cases in all: seventeen dismissed on the merits, one settled in Oklahoma, thirteen still live.
The State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, which maintains the public tracker of the litigation, updated it on 24 July with a flat sentence: "To date, no court at either the district court or appellate court level has ruled in favor of the Justice Department."1 What the department asks each state for is the unredacted roll, the version carrying fields officials strip out before releasing voter lists to the public.
Those rulings share a defect rather than a doctrine. A Massachusetts court threw out the first of them in April on the narrow ground that DOJ never identified the statute authorising its demand, and defendant states have copied the argument since, in front of judges appointed by presidents of both parties. None of the seventeen holds that the data may not be obtained. They hold that the department has not said why it may.
The programme has not stopped. DOJ took all eight of its early losses upward at once in June, and the one appeal decided so far went against it when a 6th Circuit panel affirmed the Michigan dismissal. The department reached for the courts only after the executive route closed. Judge Denise Casper permanently blocked Donald Trump's elections executive order, ruling that the president has no authority over how states run their elections. An executive order needs no statute behind it. A federal complaint does.
