Trump DOJ sues Kentucky over voter data access, SOS Adams' refusal

Austin Horn, Lexington Herald-Leader on Feb 26, 2026

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Kentucky has joined the list of states being sued by President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice as part of a months-long effort to access Kentucky voters’ personal information.

The DOJ claims that the information is needed to ensure “election integrity,” while officials like Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams claim that the move is a federal overreach.

Kentucky was not the only state sued in federal court Thursday, as the DOJ took legal action against Utah, Oklahoma, West Virginia and New Jersey. Those additions brought the total number of states sued to 29, plus the District of Columbia.

Adams and other election officials in Kentucky have not assented to the DOJ’s demands to give away more than 3.3 million voters’ sensitive information, including the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

“Kentucky’s elections are a national success story, and the Department of Justice has repeatedly acknowledged in court our successful work to clean up the dirty voter rolls I inherited,” Adams wrote in a statement. “Kentucky law protects voters’ personal information, and I will not voluntarily commit a data breach by providing Kentuckians’ personal data to the federal bureaucracy unless a court order tells me to.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a statement that access to the data is essential to “ensure transparency.”

“Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve. This latest series of litigation underscores that This Department of Justice is fulfilling its duty to ensure transparency, voter roll maintenance, and secure elections across the country,” Bondi wrote.

Emails and proposed agreements obtained from the State Board of Elections by the Herald-Leader through the Kentucky Open Records Act show the dialogue has been ongoing since summer. It ramped up in December with top Trump administration officials pushing the board to hand over the information, claiming they need to evaluate Kentucky’s compliance with federal voter list maintenance requirements.

Scrutiny over how states administer their elections has been a common theme for President Donald Trump and his allies since 2020, when the president lost a reelection bid to Joe Biden and pressured one secretary of state to “find votes” to help him win. Since then, he has routinely claimed without evidence that he actually won the election.

In the lawsuit, DOJ attorneys claim that Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which requires officials to retain and preserve certain voter records, gives the AG “sweeping power to obtain” the data in question.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky and names Adams as well as members of the Kentucky State Board of Elections as defendants.