Court dismisses DOJ’s Georgia voter roll lawsuit … because it filed in the wrong district

A federal court in Georgia tossed out the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) legal effort to obtain access to the state’s unredacted voter registration data Friday, because the department filed its lawsuit in the wrong district. 

“Because the Attorney General’s demand was not made in, and the demanded records are not located in, the Middle District of Georgia, the specific grant of jurisdiction… is not satisfied here,” U.S. District Judge C. Ashley Royal, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his dismissal.  

It’s the third straight loss for the DOJ in its unprecedented legal fight to obtain the full voter rolls from every state — including the private voter data of every registered voter — after federal judges in California and Oregon rebuked the department’s lawsuits in those respective states. 

But judges in both of those cases dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuits because they ruled the department did not have the legal authority to demand the private data of the states’ voters under the National Voting Rights Act, rather than because of incompetence, as in the Georgia lawsuit. 

Since Royal dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit without prejudice, the department will be able to refile their Georgia lawsuit in the correct district, the Northern District of Georgia.

This isn’t the first time the DOJ made this mistake. The DOJ similarly filed its California lawsuit in the wrong district, but U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, decided to rule on the merits because “this case concerns matters of national importance.”

“It is thus critical that a decision is rendered on the merits, so that voters know when they next go to the polls whether their voting records are private, or are subject to prying eyes,” Carter wrote.

Filing their voter roll lawsuits in the wrong district is just the tip of the incompetence iceberg for the DOJ. Democracy Docket has documented dozens of errors in the department’s campaign for voter roll data, including asking the wrong state officials for election records, leaving draft comments in official court filings, and countless misspellings and grammatical errors. 

The DOJ has, so far, sued 23 states and the District of Columbia in their effort to get access to every state’s full voter rolls. A handful of states — Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah — have voluntarily handed the DOJ full access to their voter rolls, which may violate federal law.