On April 22, 2026, the ACLU of Alaska, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed suit on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Alaska and the Alaska Black Caucus against Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom (R) and elections director Carol Beecher. The case challenges Alaska's December 2025 transfer of its complete, unredacted voter registration list to the Trump Department of Justice, including voters' full names, dates of birth, residential addresses, and either driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers.
The complaint alleges the transfer was unconstitutional and is part of “the Trump Administration's attempts to take over elections from states and subvert the 2026 midterms.” The plaintiffs ask the court to void the memorandum of understanding between Alaska and the DOJ, order the DOJ to destroy all copies of the voter list it received, and bar any further transmission of unredacted voter roll information.
The Alaska case is part of a broader pattern. The Trump DOJ has demanded voter roll access from at least 30 states and the District of Columbia under the framing of “voter fraud” investigation. In several states, that data has been used to flag voters for removal. Civil rights groups argue the program is being used to engineer removals of voters who lean Democratic, those with names that suggest immigrant ancestry, and voters of color — without judicial process and without notice to the affected voters. A separate ACLU lawsuit filed against the DOJ seeks to block what the organization calls a national “voter surveil-and-purge database.”
Theresa J. Lee, ACLU senior staff attorney: “By handing over unredacted voter data and participating in a federal power grab that could trigger improper voter roll purges, the state has put both privacy and democracy at serious risk.”
Alaska is small (~730,000 residents) but the precedent matters. A state-level Republican administration handing the federal DOJ unrestricted access to voter rolls — including Social Security data — before a midterm election year is the central legal question. If the suit fails, the Trump DOJ has a template other Republican-led state administrations can emulate.
The feared purge then happened. On July 23, 2026, the Alaska Beacon reported that the state had removed 3,048 people from its active voter list, and that many were U.S. citizens wrongly flagged as noncitizens by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles. Elections director Carol Beecher told legislators the cause was “old data” and that she wasn't sure why so many residents were labeled noncitizens; she said a typical annual DMV cross-check tags “more like 200 names” for extra scrutiny, not 3,000. Those removed can vote only if they provide additional identity documentation, and are on track to be dropped from the rolls entirely. It is the concrete version of the harm the lawsuit warned about, and of the citizenship-verification push driving it: an inaccurate flagging system sweeping up eligible citizens months before the midterms.
Update (October 22, 2026): on October 16, Alaska Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman denied the state's motion to dismiss, the Alaska Beacon reported. He wrote that the Division of Elections failed to negotiate limits on the Justice Department's influence over the voter list: “Instead, the state has given DOJ carte blanche to submit whenever it pleases, a list of whosoever names it decides, for whatever reason DOJ determines, for any number of eligible voters.” The memo also lets DOJ share the data with a private contractor. The ruling is procedural; “on a motion to dismiss, this court is obligated to accept plaintiffs' claims as true,” Zeman wrote, and the claims now go to discovery. DOJ has asked Alaska to remove no voters, a department spokesman said on October 14.
Correction (October 22, 2026): an earlier version said Alaska transferred its voter list in August 2025. The Alaska Beacon and the ACLU of Alaska both place the transfer in December 2025; the memorandum of understanding was signed on December 19, 2025, by elections director Carol Beecher and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.