An appellate court has rejected the Trump administration’s demand that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the state of Michigan turn over detailed voter records, agreeing with Benson that federal law doesn’t authorize or permit “the government’s broad request.”
The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati was issued on Wednesday, June 24, and upholds an earlier decision in the legal battle between Benson and Trump’s Justice Department issued by a federal district court judge in February.
It continues a string of legal victories for Benson, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor this year, in her efforts to defend her department’s handling of the state’s voter rolls. For years, President Donald Trump’s administration, as well as Republican groups and conservative watchdog organizations, have argued in legal filings that the voter rolls are rife with dead or illegal voters, while Benson has argued that, as the state’s top election official, the rolls have been appropriately scrubbed and ineligible voters removed in accordance with the law.
It was not immediately known if the Justice Department planned to ask the Sixth Circuit to reconsider or appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Free Press has reached out to the Justice Department and the Michigan Secretary of State’s office for comment.
The Justice Department has seen its effort to demand detailed voter records, including partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license information, as a means of purging illegal voters in other Democratic-led states fail as well in court.
After Trump began his second term in January 2025, he continued to press, without evidence, his claim that voter fraud and corruption was rampant in several states, including Democratic-led ones; later, his administration demanded Michigan and other states turn over detailed voter information so it could determine if voters were eligible to vote or not.
But Benson, like many other election officials in other states, refused, instead turning over the public list of voters without the additional personal information. Under state law, she said, she could not reveal that additional information and she argued that the federal laws cited by the Justice Department − including the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act − did not entitle it to that information.
In September 2025, the Trump administration sued Benson and the state of Michigan, claiming the refusal to turn over the detailed records violated those statutes. Similar lawsuits were brought in California, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and other states across the country.
But in February of this year, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou granted the state’s request to dismiss the Justice Department complaint, finding that the federal statutes cited by Trump’s Justice Department don’t require the release of such detailed records for various reasons, the laws either not requiring their release at all or requiring records only in cases where they might be needed to review voter list maintenance procedures, not wholesale scrubbing of the rolls.
The Justice Department filed an appeal, specifically arguing that Title III of the Civil Rights Act gave it authority to request and access such detailed records.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreed with Jarbou, however, with Judge Andre Mathis writing the opinion and noting that, under the Constitution’s Elections Clause, “States do most of the heavy lifting in overseeing federal elections” and that gives them broad power over the administration and security of elections.
Title III, he said, might entitle the Trump administration to the underlying local records with which the Secretary of State’s office creates the Qualified Voter File, but not the minute-level details of the file itself because that would bring it into conflict with voter record protections in other federal laws − and that’s not how Congress wrote it.
“We should not adopt a reading that would place election officials in violation of one federal law for trying to comply with others,” Mathis wrote, adding that even if that hadn’t been the case, the Trump administration never met its statutory requirement to give both a legal basis and a specific purpose for its request under Title III.
Senior Judge R. Guy Cole, Jr. agreed with Mathis in upholding the dismissal. Judge John Nalbandian dissented, however, believing the Qualified Voter File constitutes a record accessible under Title III and that the requests made by the Justice Department were specific enough to cover the Title III requirement.
This is a developing story and will update.
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Appeals court upholds dismissal of Trump’s demand for Michigan voter rolls
Reporting by Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
