A federal judge in New Jersey has dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking the state’s complete, unredacted voter registration list, ruling that the federal law DOJ relied on doesn’t reach the records it demanded. The July 29 decision is the latest in a string of losses for the department’s nationwide push to obtain state voter data — and it clarifies, at least in one court, where the legal limits of that push sit.
What DOJ was asking for
The case, United States v. Caldwell, traces back to July 2025, when the Justice Department first demanded that New Jersey turn over its full computerized voter registration list — including every registered voter’s full name, date of birth, residential address, driver’s license number, and the last four digits of their Social Security number. DOJ said it needed the data to investigate whether New Jersey was complying with federal voter list-maintenance requirements under the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
New Jersey’s Secretary of State, Dale Caldwell, declined to produce the unredacted file, and DOJ sued in February 2026 to compel it. The League of Women Voters of New Jersey, the Latino Action Network, the NAACP, and individual New Jersey voters intervened in the case, arguing the demand would expose sensitive personal data to misuse and had no basis in federal law.
New Jersey is not an isolated case. Beginning in the second half of 2025, DOJ sent similar demands to dozens of states and filed comparable lawsuits against a number of states with Democratic administrations. (Caldwell’s office is also a defendant in a separate, differently postured suit brought by the Republican National Committee; that case is distinct from the DOJ litigation discussed here.)
What the court decided
U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning DOJ cannot refile the same claim in his court. The ruling turned on a narrower legal question than the broader privacy arguments raised by New Jersey and the intervenors: whether Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — the statute DOJ invoked — actually authorizes this kind of demand.
Quraishi concluded it does not. Title III lets the U.S. Attorney General inspect certain state election records, but the judge found that New Jersey’s statewide, computerized voter registration list falls outside what that provision covers. Because the case was resolved on those narrower statutory grounds, the ruling doesn’t reach broader constitutional or state-privacy-law arguments that had also been raised.
In a statement following the ruling, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said that seventeen district courts and a federal court of appeals had, to that point, unanimously rejected the department’s legal theory in similar cases — a tally that does not yet include the Caldwell decision itself. It isn’t yet clear whether DOJ will appeal.
Why it matters beyond New Jersey
The ruling doesn’t resolve the underlying dispute nationally — it applies to this case, under this statute, in this district. But because DOJ has been using the same Title III theory in a wave of similar suits against other states, a dismissal on those specific statutory grounds is likely to be cited by other states and advocacy groups defending against comparable demands elsewhere.
The case also highlights a recurring feature of these disputes: they turn less on whether states should cooperate with federal list-maintenance oversight — which federal law does require in various forms — and more on which legal mechanism the federal government can use to compel it, and what data that mechanism actually reaches. Voter registration lists routinely contain sensitive identifying information, which is why states have their own laws restricting how much of that data can be disclosed and to whom, even to the federal government.
DOJ’s broader effort to compile voter data from multiple states is continuing in other jurisdictions, so Caldwell is unlikely to be the last ruling on the question this year.
Election Desk will continue tracking DOJ’s voter-data litigation in other states.
Sources
This story draws on court filings and case tracking from Democracy Docket; the ACLU of New Jersey and ACLU national case pages; the NAACP; the League of Women Voters of New Jersey; and reporting from Bloomberg Law, the New Jersey Globe, and the Jersey Vindicator, including direct quotation from Judge Zahid N. Quraishi’s July 29, 2026 opinion in United States v. Caldwell, No. 3:26-cv-02025 (D.N.J.), and a statement from New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport’s office.
Election Desk 
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