Trump Department of Justice: Now 0/26 on Voter Roll Cases

The Trump Department of Justice has been trying for some time now to force states to give up voter registration information, so Trumpers can purge them of likely-Democratic voters whom they will charge with being non-citizens. They’ve been losing, but let’s check in on their progress anyway.

The Current Score

The Trump Department of Justice wants to ignore the fact that the US constitution says states are in charge of elections. They want to impose their restrictive ideas of who should vote, no matter what the states think. This ties into their scare stories about illegal immigrants voting, a thing which pretty much never happens. However, armed with state voter registration data (and accompanying sensitive data like voting history, driver’s license info, and so on) they could wreak havoc by merely accusing large swathes of voters of being illegal just before an election.

They’ve filed something like 30ish lawsuits seeking to force state attorneys general to supply that information, usually in a way that would be illegal under the laws of those states. Marc Elias’s law firm has been fighting these suits, and his Democracy Docket has been reporting their progress.

With the latest loss in Georgia ^[1], the Trump Department of Justice now has a record of 0 wins in 26 trials. Georgia even offered them the public version of their voter rolls without the confidential information, but the DoJ insisted they wanted the one with all the personal information:

Alongside that finding, Calvert noted that, in response to the DOJ’s demands, Georgia repeatedly offered the public version of its voter roll, which is available to anyone for a fee.

After 0 wins in 26 trials, what should we believe about their probability of success going forward? I mean, they’ve already lost 26 times in a row, i.e., more than half the states in the United States, so our estimate of their probability of success certainly can’t be very high!

We’ve addressed this issue before, about 2 months ago when the DoJ was 0 for 20 successes. ^[2] We showed the details of the math then, i.e., that this is about like watching a bunch of coin tosses and then asking whether the coin is loaded or not:

• You start out assuming their chance of success $p$ is a random draw from a uniform distribution on 0 to 1. This is what Bayesians call an uninformative prior, i.e., our prior beliefs don’t really assume much at all — $p$ could be anything.
• Then after observing $N$ trials with $k$ successes, the Bayesian posterior is a Beta distribution $B_{k+1, N-k+1}(p)$. It’s not terribly important what the details of that distribution are, other than that they are well known (by people who spend time finding out such things, anyway).

So here’s what it looks like for the current situation $N = 26$ trials and $k = 0$ successes. The probability $p$ for success going forward would be a random draw against this distribution, $B_{1, 27}(p)$. But it’s grim news for the DoJ: as you can see from the plot, the median is 2.53%, and we’re 95% sure that the real value is in 0.094% – 12.77%.

In other words, with a 2.5% chance of success, it’s kind of crazy to keep trying. Instead, you should either change your strategy or evaluate whether this is the right sort of thing to be doing in the first place!

What sort of person keeps doing the same thing anyway? My guess, is either:

• Ideologues so committed to Trumpian fascism that they’ll keep on no matter what.
• DoJ lawyers, particularly those near retirement, who can’t endanger their families by getting fired and hence will obey orders. Even stupid ones.

The former are immune to reason and deserve our contempt. The latter deserve some sympathy, though we’d all prefer they refuse to obey bad orders from bad people for bad purposes.

The Weekend Conclusion

Even just looking at the court statistics, the Trump lawsuits are insane. His lawsuits about the 2020 election were equally absurd: he lost all of them, but just kept pounding away in spite of being proven repeatedly wrong.

Keep that in mind as the primaries approach: Trump is being proven repeatedly wrong.

So vote, and vote Democratic, all up and down the ticket. Removing substantially all Republicans is the only way forward that’s consistent with democracy.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

1: J Knutson, ” DOJ now 0-26 after judge rejects demand for Georgia voter rolls”, Democracy Docket, 2026-Sep-30. ↩

2: Weekend Editor, “Department of Justice Denied Access to State Voter Rolls… Again”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2026-Aug-04. ↩