CHARLESTON — The U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing Monday it has broad and sweeping authority to demand West Virginia’s entire unredacted voter registration database.

DOJ attorneys filed a memorandum Monday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia as it seeks approval from the court for a motion to compel West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner to turn over its statewide voter registration list, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA).

“This is a straightforward case … The CRA empowers the United States to immediately obtain those records, including West Virginia’s statewide Voter Registration List,” wrote Christopher J. Gardner, a trial attorney for the Voting Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, a U.S. assistant attorney general with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State’s Office on Feb. 26 after Warner sent a written response to the DOJ denying its request on Feb. 11.

The DOJ began sending letters to state elections officials last summer requiring states to turn over voter registration databases to federal law enforcement officials. DOJ officials first contacted the Secretary of State’s Office last September seeking this data, with follow-up letters sent in December 2025 and January of this year.

West Virginia is one of 29 states being sued by the DOJ for refusing to turn over voter registration data. According to Gardner, Title III of the CRA requires election officers to preserve and produce records relating to acts requisite to voting in federal elections in order to assess compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

“(The CRA) imposes a ‘sweeping’ obligation requiring officers of election to preserve and, on request, to produce registration records pertaining to federal elections,” Gardner wrote. “Congress vested the Attorney General with broad authority to obtain federal election records under Title III of the CRA.”

Gardner argued that previous legal precedents limit the court’s role in blocking valid DOJ demand for state voting records, and that the CRA does not require federal officials to prove a violation of the law to seek those records. Gardner also said the Secretary of State’s Office cannot cite state privacy or confidentiality laws in denying a request for voter registration records.

“Secretary Warner cannot deny the Attorney General access to West Virginia’s SVRL or other federal elections records because of conflicting state law,” Gardner wrote. “While the United States Constitution invests states with broad powers over the conduct of federal elections, it also explicitly authorizes Congress to override those state choices.”

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, federal judges in California, Michigan and Oregon have rejected similar DOJ attempts to obtain voter registration data. So far, the DOJ has requested similar data from 47 states with 11 states agreeing to provide the information. President Donald Trump is pushing for a federal voter registration database to remove ineligible voters, such as illegal immigrants, from state voter rolls traditionally handled by state and local election officials.

“Congress passed the Civil Rights Act to empower federal intervention when states were actively blocking people of color from voting,” wrote Andrew Garber, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, in a March 3 article on the Brennan Center’s website. “The law is not a blank check for the federal government to overrun state election management.”

The West Virginia Citizens Action Group, represented by the ACLU-WV, filed a motion last week to intervene in the DOJ’s lawsuit.