President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has suffered its 18th consecutive courtroom defeat — with zero victories — in its campaign to access state voter registration data, after a federal judge dismissed the department's lawsuit seeking New Jersey's unredacted voter rolls on Wednesday.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee and the first Muslim-American federal judge in U.S. history, is particularly notable because it involved a case in which noncitizens were confirmed to have voted. New Jersey had disclosed that a software glitch at its DMV inadvertently added approximately 6,600 noncitizens to the state's voter rolls, with roughly 400 of those individuals casting ballots in the 2023 and 2024 elections. The DMV's role in voter registration stems from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires state motor vehicle agencies to offer voters the opportunity to register when obtaining or renewing a license.

According to Democracy Docket's Yunior Rivas, Judge Quraishi wrote that the error had "no bearing" on whether DOJ had a right to the voter rolls. In his decision, Quraishi granted New Jersey's motion to dismiss and denied DOJ's motion to compel the records, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 does not grant the federal government access to the state's live voter registration database. The statute, originally enacted during the civil rights movement to protect Black voters from discriminatory barriers, has been a recurring but largely unsuccessful vehicle for the administration's voter data demands.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime punishable by fines, imprisonment, and deportation, and existing enforcement mechanisms do not require states to hand over their full voter databases to the Department of Justice.

The dismissal with prejudice prevents DOJ from refiling the same claim in the district court, though the department retains the right to appeal — an option it has pursued in nearly every prior loss. Rivas also noted that New Jersey had already provided DOJ with its publicly available voter list.

In his ruling, Judge Quraishi emphasized that "the Constitution's architects chose to delegate election administration to the states, recognizing that local governments have the deepest understanding of their constituents' circumstances." Quoting from the Massachusetts Convention's 1788 debates on the Constitution, the judge added that "the Framers of the Constitution chose to embrace balance in crafting the Elections Clause. The diffusion of power between state and federal government was intended to 'preserve and restore to the people their equal and sacred rights of election [against] the influence of ambitious or popular characters, or in times of popular commotion, and when faction and party spirit run high.'"

The Trump administration's 0-18 record on voter data demands reflects a consistent pattern of judicial rejection of its election-related claims. The DOJ's lawsuit was prompted by New Jersey's disclosure that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were erroneously registered through a DMV software malfunction, with approximately 400 individuals actually voting in the 2023 and 2024 elections.

Legal experts argue that the DOJ is using the noncitizen voting issue — which affects less than 0.01% of votes cast — as a pretext to obtain access to voter databases that could facilitate partisan purges. Constitutional scholars note that the Framers deliberately distributed election authority between states and the federal government to guard against centralized manipulation of the kind the administration is now pursuing.

Despite the repeated legal setbacks, the Trump administration continues to file similar lawsuits across the country, a pattern that critics say suggests the litigation strategy is aimed less at remedying actual election fraud and more at generating a veneer of legitimacy for efforts to undermine state election administration. (Politico)