Kentucky has joined a growing list of states being sued by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department as part of a months-long effort to obtain Kentucky voters’ personal information.
The DOJ says it needs the data to ensure “election integrity,” while Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams argues the request amounts to federal overreach.
Kentucky was not alone in facing legal action Thursday. The DOJ also sued Utah, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and New Jersey, bringing the total number of states targeted to 29, plus the District of Columbia.
Adams and other Kentucky election officials have declined the DOJ’s request to release sensitive information for more than 3.3 million voters, including the last four digits of Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.
“Kentucky’s elections are a national success story, and the Department of Justice has repeatedly acknowledged in court our successful work to clean up the dirty voter rolls I inherited,” Adams said in a statement. “Kentucky law protects voters’ personal information, and I will not voluntarily commit a data breach by providing Kentuckians’ personal data to the federal bureaucracy unless a court order tells me to.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said access to the records is necessary to “ensure transparency.”
“Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve. This latest series of litigation underscores that this Department of Justice is fulfilling its duty to ensure transparency, voter roll maintenance, and secure elections across the country,” Bondi wrote.
Emails and draft agreements obtained from the Kentucky State Board of Elections through the Kentucky Open Records Act show discussions have been underway since summer. The exchanges intensified in December, when senior Trump administration officials pressed the board to provide the data, saying they needed to assess Kentucky’s compliance with federal voter list maintenance laws.
Questions about how states administer elections have remained a consistent theme for Trump and his allies since 2020, when he lost his reelection bid to Joe Biden and urged one secretary of state to “find votes” to overturn the result. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that he won that election.
In the lawsuit, DOJ attorneys argue that Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — which requires officials to retain and preserve certain voter records — grants the attorney general broad authority to obtain the requested data.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky and names Adams along with members of the Kentucky State Board of Elections as defendants.
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