Monday, June 8, 2026

Pasadena Court Weighs Trump Administration’s Bid to Revive Dismissed California Voter-Data Suit

[File photo]

Arguments were heard mid-May. Three federal judges have yet to issue rulings

On a morning in May, three federal appeals judges in a Pasadena courtroom pressed a Justice Department lawyer on a single question: whether the Trump administration can compel California to surrender the personal data of its approximately 23 million registered voters.

The argument, heard May 19 at the Ninth Circuit’s Richard H. Chambers Courthouse on South Grand Avenue, put Pasadena at the center of a national fight over who controls Americans’ voter information.

The case, United States v. Weber, is part of what the administration describes as an effort to police state voter rolls — and what a federal judge has called an “unprecedented and illegal” attempt to gather the sensitive data of millions of Americans in a centralized federal database. No ruling has yet issued.

The dispute began in 2025, when the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division started demanding that states turn over their complete voter registration lists, including driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The department says it needs the records to confirm that states are removing ineligible voters and keeping accurate rolls, as federal law requires.

Most states refused to provide the unredacted files. The department has since sued 30 states and the District of Columbia, all led by Democrats or carried by Joe Biden in 2020.

California was among them. Secretary of State Shirley Weber declined to hand over the full file — which also listed voters’ dates of birth, voting history and party registration — citing state and federal privacy laws, and offered instead to let federal officials inspect the unredacted database in person, by appointment.

The Justice Department appealed, and the Ninth Circuit combined California’s case with a nearly identical one from Oregon. At the May hearing, the panel — two judges appointed by President Biden, one by President Trump — pressed the government’s attorney, Andrew Braniff, on its legal footing. Judge Lucy Koh asked why, if the department’s authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was as clear as it claimed, the law had gone uncited in its first letter to state officials.

Across the country, the department has yet to win any of the cases decided on the merits in trial courts.

Intervenors including the League of Women Voters of California and the NAACP have argued that releasing the data could expose immigrant communities to harm if the information were shared with the Department of Homeland Security — a prospect the department has acknowledged in some court hearings and disavowed in others.

The administration maintains it is enforcing election-integrity laws and ensuring that only citizens vote. Critics, intervenor groups, and the judges who have ruled so far describe the broader effort differently: as a pretext to build a national voter database and aid immigration enforcement.

In May, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation barring law enforcement, including federal agents, from accessing the state’s voter rolls without a court order or an investigation into specific violations of state election law.

The appeal remains pending.

When he dismissed the case in January, Carter said he expected an appeal regardless of how he ruled — and observers say the question of who may hold Americans’ voter data could ultimately reach the Supreme Court, decided in part by an argument heard a few miles from Pasadena’s own polling places.