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

On April 1, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division sued Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane in federal court, asking a judge to order him to produce Idaho's complete, unredacted voter registration list -- including voters' full names, dates of birth, and driver's-license numbers or partial Social Security numbers for all of the state's roughly 1 million registered voters. The lawsuit followed McGrane's repeated refusals: he first declined DOJ's September 2025 demand by offering only Idaho's public, de-identified voter list; on December 8, 2025, a DOJ attorney emailed a hard deadline for the unredacted data and told Idaho officials the department had "sued six states earlier this week" for the same refusal; and in February 2026 McGrane wrote DOJ that he saw no "clear legal duty" requiring Idaho to comply and that state law required him to protect the data absent one.

DOJ's suit invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1960, arguing the statute entitles the department to inspect state voter records to verify list-maintenance compliance -- a legal theory federal courts had already rejected in suits against other states. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said the department would "continue to verify that all States are carrying out critical election integrity legal duties"; McGrane responded that Idaho's own citizenship-verification checks, run with the Department of Homeland Security, had referred only 11 suspected noncitizens for prosecution, and that he remained confident in the state's list-maintenance procedures. The suit was the 30th DOJ had filed against a state for refusing to hand over its complete voter file, part of a nationwide campaign that by then had reached every state and Washington, D.C.

Updates

2026-04-06 — NAACP groups moved to intervene in the case [3]

On April 6, 2026, the NAACP, its Tri-State Conference of Idaho, Nevada and Utah, and the Idaho Alliance for Retired Americans filed a motion to intervene in DOJ's lawsuit against McGrane, seeking to defend Idaho's refusal to disclose the unredacted voter data. [3]

2026-05-21 — Case stayed pending Ninth Circuit rulings in parallel suits [3]

On May 21, 2026, the case was paused pending the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit's decisions in DOJ's parallel voter-data suits against California and Oregon, whose outcomes bear directly on the legal theory underlying the Idaho suit. [3]