CHARLESTON – An advocacy group is seeking to intervene against efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain voter registration records after the West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner said no to turning over those records in February.

The West Virginia Citizens Action Group (CAG), represented by the ACLU-WV, filed a petition Thursday to intervene in a lawsuit brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia on Feb. 26 by Harmeet K. Dhillon, a U.S. assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

The DOJ is asking a federal judge to order Warner to turn over the state’s entire voter registration database, including the names, date of birth, addresses, drivers’ license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers of voters. While voter registration is conducted by county clerks, the Secretary of State’s Office maintains the Statewide Voter Registration System.

West Virginia is one of 29 states being sued by the DOJ for refusing to turn over voter registration. In a separate memorandum of law filed along with the motion to intervene, the ACLU-WV and CAG argue that the DOJ has provided no reasoning for seeking the data as required by the Civil Rights Act.

“(The Civil Rights Act) requires the Attorney General to provide both the basis and the purpose for seeking voter data, and the (DOJ) has done neither, offering instead a vague claim that it wishes to ensure West Virginia’s compliance with the NVRA (National Voter Registration Act) and HAVA (Help America Vote Act),” wrote ACLU-WV Legal Director Aubrey Sparks.

“These lawsuits, however, are not targeted investigations into specific potential violations of the law,” Sparks continued. “Rather, they are a sweeping, extraordinary, and anomalous effort to collect state voter data without regard for state and federal privacy protections, or the state’s constitutional primacy in election administration.”

The DOJ began sending letters to state elections officials last summer requiring states to turn over voter registration databases to federal law enforcement officials. DOJ officials first contacted the Secretary of State’s Office last September seeking this data, with follow-up letters sent in December 2025 and January of this year. Warner sent a written response to the DOJ denying their request on Feb. 11.

“West Virginians entrust me with their sensitive personal information,” Warner said in a Feb. 11 statement. “Turning it over to the federal government, which is contrary to State law, will simply not happen. State law is clear: voter lists are available in a redacted format from my office, but I’ll not be turning over any West Virginian’s protected information.”

Warner pointed to a Feb. 10 ruling by a federal judge in Michigan dismissing a similar request, citing that federal election laws do not empower the DOJ to seek all unredacted voter registration files. Warner said he was willing to cooperate with federal officials in other ways, but voter roll maintenance was the job of county clerks with assistance by the Secretary of State’s Office.

“My responsibility is first and foremost to the citizens of West Virginia,” Warner said. “We will comply with the law, which does not allow us to release protected data. We have offered to work cooperatively with the federal government to maintain the continuity of elections nationwide, but the DOJ doesn’t have authority to run a state’s elections. I support efforts to strengthen election integrity, but I will not break the law, give up our state’s rights, or compromise the privacy of our citizens.”

President Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress have been focused on giving the federal government more of a hand in ensuring that those not qualified to vote — such as illegal immigrants — are not on state voter registration rolls despite documented evidence that there are very few instances of non-U.S. citizens voting in elections, including by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Under the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act now stalled in the U.S. Senate, states would be required to turn over voter registration information to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Trump signed an executive order earlier this week directing the U.S. Postal Service to only send mail-in ballots to voters that appear on a list of citizens to be compiled by DHS with assistance from the Social Security Administration. This order is already being challenged in federal court.

“This federal takeover of list maintenance would run contrary to constitutional and statutory frameworks for elections, which provide that Congress and the states make the law, and state and local governments run elections, including registering voters and maintaining voter rolls,” Sparks wrote.