DOJ sued Colorado to compel release of unredacted, sensitive voter roll data

On December 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, seeking to compel Colorado to produce its complete, unredacted statewide voter registration database — including voters' full names, dates of birth, residential addresses, and either driver's-license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The suit invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as authority to demand the records.

The lawsuit followed nearly a year of exchanges between DOJ and Griswold's office. DOJ first requested Colorado's voter data on May 12, 2025; Griswold's office responded by sharing only its publicly available master voter file. On December 1, 2025, a DOJ attorney in the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section emailed a renewed request for the unredacted list, which Griswold declined by email on December 2, 2025, stating she would not produce unredacted voter files or sign the department's proposed data-sharing agreement. Weeks earlier, Griswold had led a November 18, 2025 letter — signed by ten secretaries of state — asking DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to clarify how they intended to use and share collected voter data; neither agency replied. Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division oversaw the suit, one of roughly 30 the department had filed nationwide against states for withholding unredacted voter rolls.

Griswold called the demand an attempt to obtain Coloradans' sensitive voting information without legal right, saying in a statement that she would "continue to protect our elections and democracy" and would not turn over the data. Colorado's 2024 update to its open-records law separately restricts release of sensitive personal data, including birth dates, from the state's voter file.

Updates

2026-08-04 — Judge dismissed suit with prejudice, DOJ's 20th straight defeat [4, 5, 6, 7]

U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer dismissed DOJ's suit against Colorado with prejudice, ruling that the department had not shown a valid statutory purpose for demanding the state's unredacted voter rolls and that the rolls are not records DOJ is entitled to under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act, or the Help America Vote Act. The ruling, which the department cannot appeal by refiling, was DOJ's 20th consecutive loss in its nationwide voter-roll-data litigation campaign; 12 of the 20 adverse rulings, including this one, came from judges appointed by Republican presidents. Griswold said the ruling affirmed that "Trump's DOJ has no right to Coloradans' sensitive voter information."