SALEM, OR – A federal judge tentatively ruled Wednesday that Oregon does not have to hand over personally identifiable data of more than 3 million Oregon voters to the federal government.

In an oral ruling Wednesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said he plans to dismiss the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Oregon and Secretary of State Tobias Read. Kasubhai, appointed by former President Joe Biden, allowed that his final written decision may be different.

Read welcomed the ruling in a statement, calling it a big win for Oregonians’ privacy and the rule of law.

“The federal government tried to abuse their power to force me to break my oath of office and hand over your private data,” he said. “I stood up to them and said no. Now, the court sided with us. Tonight, we proved, once again, we have the power to push back and win.”

The U.S. Department of Justice demanded last summer that Oregon and other states hand over a wide range of information, including the full name, date of birth, residential address and driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for every registered voter.

Secretary of State Tobias Read refused, saying that doing so would violate Oregonians’ privacy rights and that the federal government has no authority to demand that data.

The federal government responded by suing the state in September. U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, appointed by former Democratic President Joe Biden, heard arguments Wednesday over whether to dismiss the case in U.S. District Court in Eugene.

“I’m very cautious and doubtful that what you’re asking for, which is an unredacted list, is actually going to give you the information that you need to establish a violation” of two voting-related laws, Kasubhai said.

The lawsuit alleges the state violated the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 by not turning over voter data.

Oregon regularly provides a redacted version of its voter registration list to political parties and voter outreach groups, and the state has maintained that it will provide that redacted list to the federal government. That list includes voters’ names, addresses, political parties and birth years, but not birth dates or months, Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers.

“The list itself is not an uncommon thing to be requested, but the (National Voting Rights Act) doesn’t distinguish between the special list that you have to provide the federal government with this additional private information,” said Thomas Castelli, an attorney for the state. “It’s just not in there.”

State leaders and the nonprofit group Our Oregon, which intervened in the case, have cited concerns that the Department of Justice wants to use voter data for immigration enforcement. It’s both illegal and extremely rare for noncitizens to vote: One study of the 2016 election found just 30 incidents nationwide of suspected noncitizen voting, or 0.0001% of votes cast.

Oregon last year found more than 1,800 people were registered to vote in error despite not providing documents indicating they were citizens while at the state’s Motor Vehicle Services Division. Only 39 of those people voted, and several of them later established that they were citizens when they voted.

The state did not pursue criminal charges against any of those voters because none knowingly broke the law, and the Secretary of State’s Office added guardrails to prevent similar mistakes.

Branden Lewiston, an attorney representing Our Oregon and several Oregon voters who intervened in the lawsuit, said reporting and public statements from U.S. Department of Justice officials indicated that the federal government is trying to create a national voter registration list and run it through databases held by the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. DOGE Service, an initiative formerly led by Trump campaign donor Elon Musk.

The federal government would then use that data to identify people it wants to remove from voter rolls, Lewiston said.

A few days before the federal government sued Oregon, an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Justice told Stateline that the department is sharing voter information with the Department of Homeland Security to search for noncitizens to “scrub aliens from voter rolls.”

The federal government is suspicious of Oregon’s voter rolls in part because the state succeeded in registering more eligible voters than the national average. More than 95% of U.S. citizens aged 18 or older in Oregon were registered to vote ahead of the November 2024 election, compared to 73.6% of adult citizens nationwide.

“When you see a state that’s consistently above 90% of the citizen voting age population, it’s a potential yellow flag,” federal attorney  James Thomas Tucker said. “When the state goes above the 95% threshold, that’s a red flag.”

Oregon was the first state in the nation to automatically register adult citizens to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses or state ID cards at the Motor Vehicle Services Division, and the number of registered voters rose to more than 3 million in the decade since that law took effect.

The state also automatically restores voting rights to people convicted of felonies after they complete their sentences, while other states restrict voting rights in perpetuity or until someone convicted of a crime pays fines and petitions the government to have their voting rights restored.

Oregon also regularly leads the nation in voter turnout, though rates have declined since automatic voter registration added more voters to the rolls. Last year’s presidential election had a 75.4% turnout in Oregon, down from the 2004 peak of 86.5%, but well above the national 65.3% turnout.

Oregon and Maine were the first two states the Trump administration sued on Sept. 16, though it has now sued at least 23 states. Kasubhai’s early questions of Tucker centered on differences between the Oregon lawsuit and subsequent complaints against other states.

The lawsuits against Oregon and Maine allege the states violated the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 by not turning over voter data. More recent lawsuits, including two filed against Arizona and Connecticut last week, rely only on the Civil Rights Act.

That law requires all election officers to maintain, for 22 months after a federal election, all records, including voter registrations, for everyone who voted in that election and make those documents available for the U.S. attorney general to inspect and copy.

“There was certainly a realization within the department that we were making our jobs more difficult than we needed to make them,” Tucker said.

But Kasubhai was skeptical that the Civil Rights Act, which passed as part of a series of laws targeting discrimination including disenfranchisement of Black voters, was relevant to the federal government’s argument.

“I can appreciate that the context in which the Civil Rights Act was promulgated was because of the historical exclusion of people on the basis of race from voting,” he said. “And so I think exclusion was the primary consideration, not over-inclusion.”

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.