The president really wants a national database of registered voters. He’s come up way short — again.

In his first term, President Donald Trump established a commission to investigate voter fraud. It requested states’ voter files, though they uniformly declined. Mississippi’s deeply conservative Republican secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” Trump’s commission imploded, disbanding just months after its failure of a launch.

In Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division instead went after the voter files, demanding rather than asking. At least 18 states voluntarily provided data. The rest, led by officials both Republican and Democratic, said no.

Starting in September 2025, the DOJ sued, essentially, every state who hadn’t fallen in line. Federal trial courts have ruled on 26 cases, and the DOJ’s record is 0-26. (Plus 0-1 on appeal.) The main difference between Trump’s Civil Rights Division and the woeful 2016-17 Cleveland Browns: Across two seasons, at least the Browns managed one win.

But last Friday brought an even more emphatic shellacking. The rulings until then had been state-specific and turned on whether the DOJ had statutory authority to demand the files (the answer: unanimously, no). Friday’s decision, from a D.C. federal court, said the entire enterprise was unlawful from the start — not only that the DOJ lacked authority to demand the files, but also that it violated federal law when states voluntarily provided them. And though the lawsuit was a civil case, the court’s findings support the notion that somebody at the DOJ committed federal crimes for each state file they took in. (DOJ says it is “reviewing” the decision.)

The primary restriction here is the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate statute that reflects well-earned skepticism about federal dossiers on American citizens, and demands an opportunity for public discussion before the government collects new data on individuals (or uses old data in new ways). The statute requires a published notice with answers to basic questions: What are you collecting about whom, why are you using it, who’s got access and how is it safeguarded? It’s the sort of thing anyone giving half a second of thought to a data project should be able to answer.

The DOJ never bothered. Instead, well after the voter file effort was thoroughly underway, the DOJ pointed backward to a filing with origins in 1983, when the Civil Rights Division notified the public that it might collect information on “[s]ubjects of investigation” and “victims” of civil rights violations. It’s obvious that a government agency investigating civil rights claims would collect information on victims, perpetrators and witnesses. Trump’s DOJ essentially said the 1983 notice put every registered American on notice that the department could vacuum up their voter records.

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Friday’s D.C. court decision correctly found that argument preposterous.

And willfully collecting data on Americans without the basic notice? That’s a federal crime.

Why would the DOJ have bothered with this effort in the first place? There are three possibilities, all admittedly pretty stupid.

The first: DOJ lawyers wanted to look busy for the boss. The Civil Rights Division quickly purged much of its talent interested in traditional civil rights enforcement. Going after voter files with redacted data was an intriguing next step, and also something to do.

The second: They believed the hype. Maybe they thought the files would reveal massive fraud, particularly by noncitizens, setting up legitimate enforcement efforts. Time and again, real reviews of the rolls find that election officials do a good job keeping things clean. But drinking that much Kool-Aid can leave you thirsty for “proof” of a fountain of fraud that doesn’t exist.

The third: They wanted a prop. For a decade, the president has repeatedly lied about election fraud. It’s not clear anyone is still listening when the Boy Who Cried Wolf cries wolf. But perhaps they thought it’d be more convincing to fill the otherwise empty manila folders of evidence with meaningless printouts of voter files.

None of this was ever likely to bear fruit.

And none of it is likely to affect the midterms much. Most states never gave the DOJ their files. Of the few that did, even fewer pledged to act on whatever unreliable garbage data the DOJ sent back. (Most states are smarter than that. For those that weren’t, Friday’s opinion might further advance litigation over unreliable list maintenance performed as a result.) And the DOJ’s credibility has now cratered so thoroughly that nobody should take its claims at face value — with or without voter files.

So Friday’s opinion should firmly stop what was already an inept effort. But don’t mistake inept for benign. The decision shows that the country’s chief law enforcement agency was breaking federal law. That’s reason enough to greet the farce with a frown.

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