President Donald Trump’s administration has filed a lawsuit in federal court attempting to force Connecticut election officials to turn over all of the state’s voter registration data.

Attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Connecticut on Tuesday after Stephanie Thomas, Connecticut’s Secretary of the State, refused to provide that office with all of the voter registration information that was requested.

In Connecticut, portions of the state’s voter registration database are publicly available to anyone who requests the information and pays a $300 fee.

But Thomas, who has served as Connecticut’s Secretary of the State since 2023, has refused to give the DOJ another version of that data, which includes voters’ Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

In letters that were shared back and forth between August and December of last year with the Justice Department, Thomas argued that Connecticut law prohibits her office from sharing the Social Security and driver’s license numbers included in the voter registration data with anyone.

In its complaint in federal court, however, the DOJ attorneys disagreed and argued that federal law — specifically the Civil Rights Act — requires the state to turn over that information.

“Secretary Thomas’ refusal to produce the records demanded constitutes a failure to
comply with federal law,” the DOJ wrote in the complaint.

Connecticut is not the first state to be sued by the Trump administration for declining to turn over voter registration information. In total, the Trump administration has filed lawsuits against 23 states and the District of Columbia over similar denials.

Those lawsuits are part of a larger shift within the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which has sought to investigate claims of voter fraud and recently advanced complaints from right-wing groups that have repeatedly pushed unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud.

“I am not surprised that Connecticut has been added to the long list of
states being sued on these grounds,” Thomas said in a statement on Tuesday. “As Secretary of the State, my foremost responsibility is to the voters of Connecticut who entrust the state and their local election officials with sensitive data so they can participate in our representative democracy without fear that their information will be misused or exposed.”

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong also said in a statement that the state sought to comply with the DOJ’s requests while adhering to state law.

“We tried to work cooperatively with the DOJ to understand the basis for
their request for our voters’ sensitive personal information,” Tong said. “Rather than
communicating productively with us, they rushed to sue. The state of
Connecticut complies with federal law and takes its obligations under
federal laws very seriously, and we will vigorously defend the state against
this deeply disappointing lawsuit.”

Thomas’ refusal to voluntarily turn over the Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers for every registered voter in the state was roundly criticized by state Republican officials on Wednesday.

In a joint statement, House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, and Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, R-Wolcott, called the arguments that Thomas and Tong were making were “laughable.”

“The resistance of Secretary Thomas and Attorney General Tong to federal voter integrity efforts should concern every Connecticut resident — especially given a system that allowed deep election corruption to thrive in Bridgeport,” the Republicans wrote. “If a Democratic administration had made this request, the data would have been on a FedEx truck within the hour.

“Secretary Thomas and Attorney General Tong slice and dice voter data for their own campaigns, so their attempt to position themselves as protectors of ‘sensitive’ information is laughable. They should comply with this request for public information, not obstruct it. Otherwise, residents will rightly wonder what their party has to hide,” they added.

Meanwhile, Senate President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, responded to the lawsuit by criticizing Trump and the unfounded claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

“Once again, the Trump administration is using threats and coercion to try to collect Connecticut voters’ private data that it has no legal basis for requesting, and which we can only surmise has no beneficial motive for using,” they wrote. “Connecticut is one of nearly 20 Democratic states that Trump’s Justice Department is now bullying in order to create a national citizen database. Connecticut will fight for our citizens’ right to privacy, and we will not surrender to the countless election deniers and conspiracy theorists who inhabit the Trump administration.”