Indiana Gave DOJ Nearly 5 Million Voters' Personal Data. A Biden-Appointed Judge Just Struck Down the Program Built on It.

The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, headquarters of the U.S. Justice Department. Photo: APK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

If you're registered to vote in Indiana, the U.S. Justice Department has had your name, address, driver's license number and the last four digits of your Social Security number since September 2025. Secretary of State Diego Morales sent the whole file, nearly 5 million Hoosiers, after a letter from the Trump administration asked for it, Indiana Public Broadcasting reported at the time.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington said the program that file was feeding has to stop.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan set aside the department's entire Voter List Maintenance Policy in a 78-page opinion, finding that none of the laws DOJ leaned on, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, gave it authority to collect unredacted statewide voter rolls and share them across the government. She also found the policy broke the Privacy Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The ruling reaches files the department already holds, not just the ones it's still suing over, CBS News reported.

“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” Sooknanan wrote.

Two weeks after the Supreme Court paused her last election ruling

Readers should know who's holding the gavel here. Sooknanan was nominated by President Joe Biden in 2024 and took the bench in 2025. She once clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In June she ruled that the administration's overhauled SAVE citizenship database was built unlawfully, and the Supreme Court paused that ruling last month, CBS noted.

That Sept. 25 order wasn't subtle. The justices' unsigned opinion said Washington has “an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” and that blocking SAVE “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” The Indiana Citizen reported. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita had signed a brief with Florida, Iowa and Ohio urging exactly that result.

Sooknanan also refused DOJ's request to limit Friday's relief to the people who sued, and instead vacated the policy for the whole country, Democracy Docket reported. One district judge wiping out a national program weeks before a federal election is the kind of move conservatives have spent years complaining about, and the department has every right to test it on appeal.

What DOJ actually built

Strip away the politics and the program's machinery is worth a hard look on its own terms. According to the record described in the ruling, DOJ demanded complete voter rolls from 49 states and the District of Columbia. Eighteen states turned theirs over. The department passed cooperating states' files to the Department of Homeland Security to run through SAVE, set up an arrangement to share voter files with Homeland Security Investigations, and had states agree to “clean” their rolls within 45 days of any flag, Democracy Docket reported.

The judge's central problem was accuracy. She found DOJ never seriously weighed the risk that federal citizenship records, which can lag for people who became citizens after getting a Social Security number, would flag Americans as foreigners. She cited a 2006 Social Security Administration audit that found about 3.3 million U.S. citizens misidentified as noncitizens, The Hill reported. She also called “nonsensical” the department's argument that everyone on a state voter roll could be treated as a subject of a voter-fraud investigation for records purposes.

Conservatives who don't trust a federal database with their gun purchases or their medical records have reason to think about that one. A citizen who registered to vote didn't sign up to be catalogued as an investigative subject in a Washington records system, and a 45-day removal clock built on a list with a known error rate is the sort of thing a skeptic of big government ought to ask questions about, whoever is running the department.

Sooknanan, for her part, went out of her way to say what she wasn't doing. “The Court’s decision does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections,” she wrote, adding that Congress left the question of who votes “where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.” Hearing a Biden appointee make the states'-rights case is its own kind of news.

Indiana's own checks keep running

That last line matters most here, because Indiana didn't wait on Washington. Morales and Rokita sued Homeland Security in 2025 and settled in November that year, winning bulk access to an upgraded SAVE system. Morales's office said it uploaded 488,030 registrations and flagged 165 people as potential noncitizens, The Indiana Citizen reported. The state's announcement said the federal data also helped confirm at least 21 noncitizens had cast ballots in recent elections.

Friday's ruling doesn't touch that. States remain free to maintain their own rolls, including through SAVE, even though DOJ can't use the system for its national program, Democracy Docket reported. And for the Nov. 3 election specifically, very little changes either way: federal law bars states from systematically removing voters within 90 days of an election, which is why CBS said the practical effect on the midterms could be limited.

Whoever wins the race to replace Morales, who isn't on the ballot, inherits both the state's SAVE arrangement and whatever is left of the federal one. Citizenship verification already came up at the candidates' debate, where Republican nominee Max Engling cast himself as the only one fully behind it.

A Justice Department spokesperson told CBS the agency is reviewing the decision. Common Cause, which brought the case with individual voters, called it “a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.” That second half isn't spin. Courthouse News counted 26 states where federal judges have tossed DOJ's lawsuits demanding voter files, and one appeals court has upheld a dismissal.

Nearly 5 million Hoosier records are still sitting in a federal file. As of Friday, the department that collected them can't put them to work under this program, and Indiana is still checking its own rolls the way it was on Thursday.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.