KVIG Informative

The Trump administration is suing Nevada for refusing to hand over the last four digits of every registered voter’s Social Security number. Nevada’s response: no.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Nevada in December, demanding the state turn over its full, unredacted voter file — including every registered voter’s full name, date of birth, home address, driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, according to the ACLU of Nevada, which has intervened in the case. Nevada is one of at least 30 states the DOJ has sued over the same demand.

The DOJ argues the disclosure is required under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, a law originally written to dismantle voter suppression tactics like poll taxes and literacy tests aimed at Black voters. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford’s office, representing Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, called that legal theory a stretch in a January motion to dismiss the case.

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Nevada had already provided the DOJ with a voter registration list in July, minus the sensitive fields state law classifies as confidential, according to Ford’s motion. The DOJ rejected that response and followed up in August demanding the full file, including the Social Security digits Nevada law explicitly protects.

Aguilar said in a statement that his office asked the DOJ repeated questions about how the data would be secured and received no clear answers. He said the requests function less like routine oversight and more like an attempt to intimidate state election officials ahead of the 2026 midterms.

A group of former DOJ employees told a California court reviewing a similar case that the government’s stated purpose — checking states’ compliance with federal voter list-maintenance laws — doesn’t hold up. They argued the real goal appears to be building a national voter database the Department of Homeland Security could tap, something Congress has never authorized.

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Advocacy groups have joined the fight in Nevada specifically. The NAACP Conference of Idaho, Nevada and Utah, the Nevada Alliance for Retired Americans and the Institute for a Progressive Nevada moved to intervene in the case in December, alongside the ACLU of Nevada and a naturalized-citizen voter.

Nevada’s motion to dismiss is still pending. Whatever a judge decides, the state’s nearly 2.2 million registered voters won’t get a say in whether their Social Security digits end up in a federal database — that call belongs entirely to a court that hasn’t ruled yet.