The Trump administration has suffered its 19th consecutive courtroom defeat in its campaign to compel states to surrender their voter registration records, according to Democracy Docket.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless, based in Illinois, dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit that sought the state's unredacted voter rolls. In her written opinion, Lawless concluded that allowing the DOJ to amend its complaint would be "futile" and dismissed the case with prejudice, barring it from being refiled in district court.

Democracy Docket described the defeat as "brutal," noting that it came just two days after another federal judge dismissed a separate DOJ lawsuit seeking New Jersey's voter rolls. The back-to-back dismissals underscore the difficulty federal prosecutors have faced in convincing courts that the DOJ's requests meet the statutory threshold for accessing state-maintained voter data.

Illinois had already turned over its redacted voter registration records to the DOJ. However, the federal lawsuit demanded additional sensitive identifying information, including driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers — data that state election officials routinely redact to protect voters from identity theft and improper use.

In her ruling, Lawless emphasized that the attorney general must articulate a "legitimate purpose" when demanding voter rolls. She warned that if an attorney general could justify such a request with any stated purpose whatsoever, the existing statutory requirement "would be pointless and it would provide him with unfettered authority to demand voting records."

The DOJ's legal argument rested on the Civil Rights Act of 1960, a statute enacted to combat racial discrimination in voting, which the department claimed obligates states to produce voter rolls and related federal voting records that come into their possession. Lawless countered this reasoning by noting that the executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections had originally created the voter rolls in question.

"An ordinary English speaker would not say that she has come into possession of something that she created, established, and maintained," Lawless wrote. "Instead, the election officials are required to preserve records that come into their possession from outside sources."

The DOJ's broader effort to obtain voter rolls from multiple states has now resulted in losses across nineteen separate court proceedings, according to Democracy Docket's tally. The unbroken streak of defeats highlights the tension between the federal government's civil-rights enforcement authority and states' long-established role as the primary administrators of elections under the U.S. constitutional framework. The initial report was published by Raw Story.