A federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department's (DOJ) demand for Michigan's unredacted voter rolls on Wednesday 24 June, the first circuit-level ruling anywhere in the year-old voter-data fight1. In United States v. Benson, a Sixth Circuit panel affirmed the dismissal 2-1. Judge Mathis wrote that Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 cannot bear the weight of a demand for every voter's date of birth, partial Social Security number and driving-licence number. The ruling binds Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Congress wrote Title III to help the DOJ investigate officials who suppressed the vote. The department now invokes it, in the panel's words, 'for an inverse purpose, to ensure that some people have not voted'2. The two-judge majority refused to read the 1960 statute as authority for auditing whether individuals had cast ballots.
The DOJ reached this appeal already losing. It had appealed all eight of its trial-court dismissals in mid-June and, weeks earlier, had dropped its own national voter-database case rather than defend it. The panel handed the department its first outright loss at the circuit level. Judge Nalbandian dissented, preserving the DOJ a path to the full Sixth Circuit or the Supreme Court.
