Today, on behalf of three of America’s leading civil rights historians, Protect Democracy and our partners at the law firm Clarick Gueron Reisbaum filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit cases involving the Trump Administration’s unlawful demands to obtain state voter lists from California and Oregon. This historians’ amicus brief provides a deep legislative history analysis to explain how the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ), in its unprecedented and illegal effort to obtain sensitive voter information nationwide, is twisting civil rights era statutes beyond their original purpose. Contrary to the administration’s arguments, these civil rights statutes were intended to help the Department of Justice gather information about racial discrimination in voting — not to compile a nationwide voter surveillance and purging apparatus, as DOJ intends to do. A similar brief was also filed in the Sixth Circuit. 

The Trump administration has invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as one of the purported authorities permitting it to collect confidential information about registered voters nationwide. The amicus brief describes how this civil rights era statute was enacted to protect Black citizens from being disfranchised on the basis of race. Officials in Deep South states had been hiding and destroying Black voters’ registration applications in order to thwart federal investigations into disenfranchisement. Lawmakers drafted the 1960 Civil Rights Act requiring states to preserve registration records for two years so that the federal government could examine individual records and assess whether voters were being disenfranchised on the basis of race. The Trump administration is not even pretending to investigate any allegations of discrimination in voting and is instead trying to deploy these statutes in ways far beyond what the text of the statute permits or what any lawmaker intended.