Voting rights advocates on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an attempt to block the government from collecting and centralizing voter registration data.

Tuesday’s complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, names voting advocacy group Common Cause and four individual voters under the care of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as plaintiffs, with the DOJ and Acting Attorney General (AG) Todd Blanche as defendants. The lawsuit aims to prevent the DOJ from collecting voter information and creating a national voter database, an initiative the complaint labels as the “Voter Registration Nationalization Policy.”

The lawsuit targets two executive orders that form, as the plaintiffs argue, the government’s “ongoing attempt to federalize election administration.” Executive Order 14,248, signed by President Donald Trump in March 2025, directed the AG to pursue information-sharing agreements with state election officials and prioritize enforcement against states that refused to cooperate. Executive Order 14,399, signed in March 2026, directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to compile a list of confirmed US citizens eligible to vote in each state from federal naturalization records, Social Security Administration data, and the DHS’s SAVE immigration verification system. The DOJ has since sued multiple states for not complying with requests for voter records.

The complaint argues that the two executive orders work together to effectively initiate a federal takeover of voter roll maintenance. The plaintiffs argue that the US Constitution and federal statutes, including the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, assign voter roll maintenance to the states. According to court records cited in the complaint, the DOJ has stated that it is seeking these records to assess compliance with federal voter roll maintenance requirements. The DOJ has also argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives it independent authority to demand the records.

The complaint further alleges:

DOJ has also run roughshod over the Privacy Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act (“PRA”), and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), threatening millions of Americans’ fundamental rights in the process.

The plaintiffs argue concrete harm based on the case of Anthony Nel, a Texas voter whose registration was wrongly cancelled after the SAVE system flagged him as a non-citizen. The complaint also broadly argues that millions of Americans whose data has been compiled face heightened risks of identity theft, wrongful removal from voter rolls, and a potential chilling effect on voter participation. If the court sides with the plaintiffs, the DOJ would be ordered to delete all voter data already collected and pause any further collection.