Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks His Admin From Michigan Voter Rolls: ‘Unconstitutional Burden on the Right to Vote’
Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
A federal judge in Michigan who was appointed by President Donald Trump dealt his administration a blow Tuesday in an opinion that ruled the state did not have to turn over its voter rolls to the federal government.
The ruling, flagged by Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, came amid over two dozen lawsuits that the Trump administration filed in an attempt to get voter data in multiple cities and states across the U.S. The president and his administration have been making comments repeating old claims of voter fraud and arguing there should be federal control of elections — contrary to the clear language in the U.S. Constitution. In late January, Trump’s FBI conducted a raid in Fulton County, Georgia and seized ballots from the 2020 election.
JUST IN: A federal judge in Michigan has rejected the administration's attempt to obtain the state's voter rolls.
Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee, said the law does not require the state to turn them over. https://t.co/e3QwxaA8oD pic.twitter.com/JSoAWk4Ouj
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 10, 2026
Judge Hala Y. Jarbou, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in September 2020, and has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2011, according to an archived version of her bio on the Oakland County, Michigan website from when she was a circuit court judge.
In her 23-page opinion, Jarbou found that the federal government had failed to show that it was entitled to the state’s records under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), or the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA).
Going through each of these three laws, the judge granted the motions to dismiss filed by the defendants (the state of Michigan and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, plus a Michigan retirees advocacy group and two Michigan residents who joined the case as intervening defendants), summarizing her conclusions as “(1) HAVA does not require the disclosure of any records, (2) the NVRA does not require the disclosure of voter registration lists because they are not records concerning the implementation of list maintenance procedures, and (3) the CRA does not require the disclosure of voter registration lists because they are not documents that come into the possession of election officials.”
Specifically regarding HAVA, Jarbou rejected the Trump administration’s arguments by noting that it had failed to “allege any violations of HAVA’s substantive provisions,” and was engaging in a fishing expedition to try and “obtain information to support its (as-yet-nonexistent) claim via discovery.”
The NVRA claim failed because of well-established precedent that Michigan can withhold “sensitive voter information,” Jarbou wrote, citing over a dozen cases finding that “to require such disclosure would contradict the NVRA’s objective of increasing voter participation because the risk of having one’s personal information misused will deter people from registering to vote,” “would also fly in the face of other federal statutes protecting private information,” would undermine election security measures by making voters’ identifying information (driver’s license numbers and last four digits of their SSNs) public and thereby no longer able to be used to verify a voter’s identify when they register, and “would potentially cause the statute to impose an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote guaranteed by the First Amendment.”
“[A] natural reading” of NVRA “suggests that it requires states to disclose information regarding the process by which they maintain their voter registration list but not the list itself,” Jarbou wrote, and this interpretation “avoids the implausible suggestion that Congress intended for every member of the public to access voters’ sensitive information.”
Similarly, the Trump administration’s efforts to argue it should be able to obtain the records under the CRA were rejected, with Jarbou pointing to “the statutory text” and finding the feds’ arguments that the law did not properly cover advances in technology like computerized records.
The distinction she found between the plain text of the law and what the feds were arguing might be “overly pedantic,” Jarbou acknowledged, but “it is a pedantic distinction made by Congress, and it is Congress’s prerogative to make distinctions that may seem unnecessary to a person reading the statute over six decades after its passage.”
Citing a book co-authored by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and renowned legal scholar and Black’s Law Dictionary editor Bryan Garner, Jarbou wrote that “a court is not a ‘telepathic time-traveler,’ and thus it ‘cannot rewrite Congressional legislation to cover a situation that Congress may not have foreseen.'”
The post Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks His Admin From Michigan Voter Rolls: ‘Unconstitutional Burden on the Right to Vote’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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