On February 26, the United States Department of Justice filed a complaint against Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams and members of the Board of Elections in order to obtain the complete, unredacted voter rolls of the state.
The complaint (PDF) is included below.
The DOJ began asking for the voter rolls in July of 2025, with SOS Adams declining to provide all the data DOJ was requesting.
As noted in the complaint, the DOJ requested that the submitted rolls contain “all fields,” including full name, date of birth, address, and driver’s license or last four digits of social security number. This was included in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was similar to MOUs submitted to other states.
The Board of Elections met in January of this year, and declined to take action on the MOU from the Department of Justice. The DOJ has now sued to get the records it is requesting.
So far, the DOJ has sued 29 states plus the District of Columbia: California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, and Washington.
Forward Kentucky reached out to the Secretary of State’s office, and received this statement:
“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. 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.”
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