The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit just ruled 2-1 that the Department of Justice cannot access Michigan's voter rolls to check for fraud. The Trump administration first requested election records back in the summer of 2025. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson refused to hand over unredacted voter information — and now a federal appeals court says she was right to do so.
The legal reasoning is something else.
Judge Andre Mathis, writing for the majority, argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was designed to protect voting access, not verify voter eligibility. "Congress enacted Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to help end voting discrimination," Mathis wrote, adding that "the government invokes Title III for an inverse purpose — to ensure that some people have not voted."
Let that distinction land for a second. The court is saying that a law meant to protect the integrity of elections cannot be used to protect the integrity of elections — because checking whether ineligible people are on the rolls is, in this judge's view, the opposite of protecting voting rights.
According to Breitbart, the DOJ didn't just ask for names. Mathis noted in his opinion that "three weeks later, the government doubled down — it demanded not only the names on Michigan's voter rolls, but also the dates of birth, partial social security numbers" and driver's license numbers. Benson's office cited statutory authority concerns as justification for refusing the unredacted data.
The administration has run into this wall before. Nine district courts have reportedly dismissed similar lawsuits brought by the federal government seeking access to state voter roll data. Michigan is not an outlier — it's part of a coordinated pattern of refusal across multiple states.
Benson's position boils down to this: the state controls the rolls, and the federal government has no business auditing them. That's a defensible argument in a vacuum. But Michigan is a swing state that was decided by razor-thin margins in recent cycles. The question isn't whether Benson has the legal authority to refuse — it's why she's so determined to exercise it.
Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was written to ensure that states couldn't hide their voter records to perpetuate discrimination. The entire point was transparency. The entire mechanism was federal access to state election data. And now a court has ruled that transparency only counts when it's looking for one kind of problem.
The administration wanted to verify that the people on Michigan's voter rolls are eligible to vote. Benson said no. Nine courts said no. The Sixth Circuit said no, 2-1.
Whatever's on those rolls, a lot of people are working very hard to make sure nobody sees it.
