The names, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of roughly eight million Georgia voters may soon be turned over to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Justice Department filed suit Thursday against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, accusing him of unlawfully refusing to release a complete copy of the state’s voter registration database to federal investigators.
The Georgia lawsuit is one of at least 22 filed by the Trump Justice Department against states and local governments over access to voter data, including recent cases involving Fulton County, Illinois, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
At least four Republican-led states, Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio, have already turned over their data, while Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee have agreed to release the files, the department said Thursday.
The Georgia case was filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Macon and assigned to Senior U.S. District Judge C. Ashley Royal.
Federal attorneys say the complete dataset is needed to assess Georgia’s compliance with federal election laws, including whether the state adequately identifies and removes duplicate voter registrations.
Raffensperger, who rebuffed Trump’s 2021 request to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election and is now running for governor, refused the request. He cited Georgia law that protects voter birth dates, social security numbers and driver’s license numbers from disclosure.
The Justice Department has asked the court to declare the refusal a violation of Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which requires election officials retain all voter registration records and release them upon request. The section was originally intended to protect the rights of voters from abuses such as requiring payment of poll taxes.
If the records are not provided, the law allows the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order compelling their release without a ruling on the merits of the request.
Raffensperger’s office responded that Georgia already maintains accurate voter rolls through extensive verification and list maintenance efforts.
In a Dec. 8 letter, the secretary of state’s office said Georgia is Real ID compliant, meaning applicants for driver’s licenses and state ID cards must prove citizenship. The state has conducted a “full citizenship audit” of its voter list, most recently ahead of the 2024 presidential election, it said.
Georgia already uses the SAVE database to verify citizenship and relies on multiple other data sources to track deaths, felony convictions and voter moves, it said. The Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements is an online system used by agencies to verify immigration status.
The state reported canceling 580,358 registrations and moving 298,421 voters to inactive status during 2025.
“Georgia has the cleanest voter rolls in the country because we verify citizenship through the federal SAVE database, use SSA data to remove dead voters and share data with other states to identify and remove voters who have moved,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
