by Jim Small, Arizona Mirror
April 28, 2026
A federal judge on Tuesday said the Trump administration has no right to Arizona’s voter registration database, the latest in a string of losses for the U.S. Department of Justice in its quest to gather voter information in every state.
Judge Susan Brnovich dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department cannot refile. Brnovich was appointed to the bench in 2018 by President Donald Trump.
In a statement, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes praised the ruling and said it “vindicates” their decision to refuse the DOJ’s demand for voter data.
“Our offices will continue to defend the privacy of Arizona voters against federal overreach,” they said in a joint statement.
In January, the DOJ sued Fontes after he refused several demands to turn over the state’s voter database. DOJ first asked Fontes to provide an unredacted electronic copy of Arizona’s voter registration rolls in July 2025. The next month, he told the Trump administration that state and federal privacy laws bar him from doing so.
The lawsuit alleged that the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which the DOJ describes as imposing a “sweeping obligation on election officials” to retain and preserve election records, granted then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “sweeping power to obtain these records.”
While DOJ framed the request for voter roll information in all 50 states as part of an effort to ensure compliance with federal voting laws, voting rights advocates and other critics said its true aim is creating a national voter database in order to ferret out undocumented immigrants.
In March, a DOJ attorney conceded to a court in Rhode Island that voter registration data collected from states — a number have voluntarily given the data to the Trump administration — is being shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so it can scour voter rolls for noncitizen voters.
Trump has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed that there are tens of millions of undocumented voters — something he attempted to prove during his first term in an effort that failed to produce any evidence.
Multiple studies have found that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare and poses no meaningful threat to election integrity. When the Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, an especially conservative think tank, it “found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023” and concluded that “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”
And Arizona voters in 2004 required that everyone provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. (Arizona is the only state with such a law.)
In her order dismissing the case, Brnovich relied heavily on analysis from a federal judge in Michigan, who similarly dismissed DOJ’s attempt to get that state’s voter file.
Like that judge, Brnovich concluded that Arizona’s statewide voter registration list is not a record the state must preserve and produce on AG demand under federal law. That’s because the database is created by state elections officials, and the requirement in federal law to give DOJ voter records applies only to applications and similar records that voters submit to election officials.
And Brnovich also noted that the Trump administration’s argument would create an internal conflict in federal election law: One section in the Civil Rights Act creates a criminal penalty for “altering” documents that must be preserved and turned over to the DOJ, but the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act require elections officials to regularly update the electronic voter database.
“Even if (the Civil Rights Act) includes a categorically ‘sweeping’ number of documents… it is not limitless,” Brnovich wrote.
This is the sixth judge to dismiss a DOJ suit seeking voter registration data. Arizona joins California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island in prevailing in court.
In each instance, federal judges have ruled that the Civil Rights Act election provisions do not apply to statewide voter databases.
***UPDATE: This story has been updated to include a comment from Adrian Fontes and Kris Mayes.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.