Picture a filing cabinet full of individual voter registration forms, each one showing the voter’s name, address, birthdate, driver’s license number, etc. It would be simple to conclude that if the federal government asked for those individual cards, Michigan would have to hand them over in accordance with title III of the 1960 civil rights act. But Michigan doesn’t keep a filing cabinet anymore. It maintains a computer database, basically a giant spreadsheet that pulls in information from all those individual sources (voter applications, DMV records, other states, the Social Security Administration) into one master list. When the DOJ asked for that spreadsheet, Michigan said no, and the court sided with Michigan, 2-1.
The majority took a stance based on language in title III that was not relevant to the premise of the statute. Think of it like baking a cake. You buy flour and eggs (that’s “coming into possession” of something). But once you bake them into a cake, you don’t say you “came into possession” of the cake, you baked it yourself. The majority says Michigan’s voter database is like the cake. It’s built out of individual records the state definitely had to hand over, but the finished database is something Michigan created itself, not something it received from someone else. And since the language in the 1960 law seemingly only covers stuff you received, not stuff you built, the database itself is off-limits.
The dissenting judge points out that unlike a cake, which is chemically transformed and can’t be un-baked, the voter database isn’t actually transformed at all. Every single row in that spreadsheet still traces back, one-to-one, to an individual record that everyone agrees the government could ask for. Nothing new was created, the information was just organized and put in one place. His point is that you can’t hide a bunch of documents you’re required to disclose just by copying them into a spreadsheet. If the ingredients are covered, the resulting recipe is covered as well.
He also points out something that makes your head hurt trying to understand the logic behind the majority reasoning. The more organized a state’s records are, the less the federal government can see. A messy state with records scattered in shoeboxes across different county offices would actually be more exposed to federal oversight than a well-organized state database, the kind of centralized database Congress told every state to build in 2002 with the Help America Vote Act(HAVA). That seems like a strange reward for good record-keeping.
There’s also a smaller, more technical argument in the case. The old 1960 law says that when the government demands records, its written demand has to explain both why it wants them and what it plans to do with them (the basis and purpose). The DOJ sent Michigan three letters. The majority looked at each letter separately and said none of them, by itself, covered both requirements so the whole demand was defective. The dissenting judge thinks that’s overly rigid. The three letters were clearly part of one ongoing conversation, the third letter even referred back to the first one. Real-world interactions rarely happen in one perfect letter, they build over time. Requiring everything to appear in a single document, when the law doesn’t actually say that, is holding the government to an artificial standard just to find a reason to say no. This ruling effectively shields a state’s most complete voter information from federal scrutiny, based on a technical distinction (received vs. created) that doesn’t hold up once you realize the “created” database is made entirely out of “received” pieces. Again, this is the exact data Congress wanted centralized in one place for the purpose of ensuring compliance and accountability when administering federal law.
The positive takeaway here is that there seems to be multiple paths forward for the DOJ. An en banc review could produce a different outcome with the full court deciding instead of the 3 judge panel. The DOJ could also re-file their request, changing the language slightly while the spirit of the request stays the same. This case differed slightly than others where the DOJ losses were more substantive than technical, so its possible at least in Michigan it could go another way after re-filing.
See the full ruling here