The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has initiated legal action against six states, aiming to compel them to disclose information about millions of voters. This move represents the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to obtain voter data.

The states involved in these new lawsuits include Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The DOJ is demanding access to statewide voter registration lists from each of these states. These lists are expected to contain details such as voters’ full names, home addresses, and either their driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

“Accurate voter rolls are essential for conducting fair and free elections. Unfortunately, many states have developed a pattern of failing to maintain basic voter roll standards,” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated while announcing the lawsuits. “The Department of Justice will persist in filing proactive legal actions to ensure states adhere to fundamental election safeguards.”

Since his first administration, President Donald Trump and his supporters have emphasized “election integrity” in their discourse. In March, the president made an attempt to mandate that voters provide proof of citizenship when registering on the federal voter form, a requirement that a federal judge later invalidated.

Earlier in September, the administration filed lawsuits against Maine and Oregon to try and secure their voter registration lists. The current White House has also targeted states like California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in its broader effort to acquire more comprehensive voter data.

But privacy groups and many leaders of the states consider the requests and subsequent lawsuits to be a drastic overreach indicative of the administration actually trying to do the very thing it professes to want to eradicate.

“Trump’s DOJ is using its immense federal power to try to intimidate us into turning over protected voter data and changing our voting processes to fit President Trump’s whims,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows blasted in a September statement responding to her state being sued. “We’re not backing down because we know our hardworking state and local election officials run excellent elections here.”

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read called the lawsuits an attempt by Trump “to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections.” The Democratic National Committee (DNC) added in an Oregon amicus brief that the lawsuit was a backdoor effort to build a “national voter file.”

The Trump administration has contended that the DOJ is charged with enforcing the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). “The Attorney General also has the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) at her disposal to demand the production, inspection, and analysis of the statewide voter registration lists,” the department said in its recent announcement.

The DOJ further holds that the CRA “imposes a ‘sweeping’ obligation on election officials to ‘retain and preserve all records and papers which come into their possession’” relating to voting, and that the courts do not have much sway in examining the DOJ’s reasoning.

“Our federal elections laws ensure every American citizen may vote freely and fairly,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results. At this Department of Justice, we will not stand for this open defiance of federal civil rights laws.”

As Democracy Docket reports, the lawsuits against the previous eight states have stalled, with no court ordering the states to release the voter information to the Trump administration.