The Department of Justice (DOJ) moved on Tuesday 2 June to dismiss Common Cause v. DOJ, the suit Common Cause brought against the department's collection of state voter rolls and their checking through SAVE1. SAVE is the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which the department used to check state voter files. Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy group, is the plaintiff; the department is the defendant.
Eight of the department's 31 voter-data suits have now been dismissed, and the DOJ is appealing six of them, in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island and Oregon2. The Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute tracking the litigation, records that at least 16 states have handed over complete voter files despite the Court fights. District judges keep dismissing the suits using portable reasoning that first emerged in Massachusetts and spread to Maine and Wisconsin.
A motion to dismiss is a defendant's routine first move. The department's own effort to collect state files runs through its suits against the states and the appeals it is pressing, where a single ruling can bind a whole circuit. The Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court covering nine western states, heard the Oregon appeal on 19 May, and the expedited Sixth Circuit is handling Michigan; neither has ruled. The slip opinion the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel issued during the district-court losing streak reads, in hindsight, as the paperwork for this pivot.
