The U.S. Department of Justice sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Thursday to demand that she release the state’s full voter registration list without any redactions.
The lawsuit follows months of demands from the federal law enforcement agency for voter lists and registrations from Colorado and other states. President Donald Trump also has made repeated demands that the state release Tina Peters, the former county clerk convicted of felonies related to her pursuit of the president’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud, from serving a sentence in state prison. (Trump attempted to pardon her later Thursday, but experts said he doesn’t have that power over state convictions.)
The DOJ lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleges that Griswold violated the federal Civil Rights Act by refusing to provide the records.
“This proceeding arises from the Attorney General’s investigation into Colorado compliance with federal election law,” states the lawsuit against Griswold.
DOJ officials in similar actions, including and three new ones this week aside from the Colorado case.
The demand against Colorado includes records of registered voters’ full names, dates of birth, residential addresses, and either their state driver’s license numbers, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers or the unique identifiers provided under the Help America Vote Act.
In a statement, Griswold said she had already released publicly available voter data to comply with the law. She said she would continue to refuse to turn over voters’ personal information.
“We will not hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump,” Griswold said in a statement. “He does not have a legal right to the information. I will continue to protect our elections and democracy, and look forward to winning this case.”
Griswold’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for Colorado attorney general used similar language in a fundraising text message sent soon after.
In a statement Friday, the DOJ said the lawsuit was an attempt to protect ballot integrity. It has now sued 18 states and Fulton County, Georgia, for voter registration records. Fifteen of the states voted in presidential elections for Democrats Kamala Harris in 2024 and Joe Biden in 2020, and the other three — the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada — voted for Biden in 2020. The state of Georgia also voted for Biden in 2020.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Departmentap Civil Rights Division in the statement. “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
