Georgia is latest state to be sued by Trump administration on elections

Tia Mitchell and Caleb Groves, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Dec 19, 2025

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ATLANTA — Earlier this month, Georgia officials sent redacted voter registration data to the U.S. government. The Trump administration determined it was not enough.

The U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday it had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Macon against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Separately, the department also filed lawsuits against two other states and the District of Columbia for not handing over all the requested documents as it seeks to verify compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.

Georgia has not filed a formal response. Officials said the state sent some information Dec. 8, but not everything because of a Georgia law forbidding the sharing of voters’ birthdays, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

The law includes an exception for the federal government, but only if it is “authorized to maintain such information” and is used for limited purposes.

“Hardworking Georgians can rest easy knowing this data was shared strictly in accordance with state law that protects voters’ privacy,” Raffensperger said in a statement.

But Raffensperger’s response has angered Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer, who told a conservative podcaster earlier this month that she interpreted it as the state telling her to “go pound sand.”

Dhillon posted a video on social media announcing the lawsuit, saying Georgia had refused to comply with the request “so that we can help those jurisdictions and all states ensure that only American citizens are voting, only one time, in our federal elections, every election cycle.”

In a letter to Dhillon earlier this month, Raffensperger’s office noted Georgia verifies the U.S. citizenship of all registered voters. It also said Georgia was the first state to conduct a full citizenship audit of its voter list, finding 20 noncitizens who had registered before the 2024 presidential election.

The Justice Department has now filed 22 lawsuits seeking voter information in at least 20 states, mostly targeting those led by Democrats, and swing states like Georgia.

In 2020, Donald Trump falsely asserted he won Georgia even though audits and reviews confirmed Joe Biden narrowly carried the state. Raffensperger, who defended the state’s election system then, is now running for governor.

All Voting is Local, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, said the Justice Department was attempting to force states to turn over sensitive information. It called the lawsuits “an abuse of power and an attempt to interfere in our elections at the behest of the Trump administration.”

“They are also part of a relentless, multipronged threat to voters’ privacy and the freedom to vote,” the statement continued. “American voters will face these harms, and state election officials should rightly sound the alarm and hold the line against any effort to silence voters for political vendettas.”