Government

DOJ Can’t Keep Its Own Cases Straight While Suing 30 States For Messy Voter Rolls

Glass Houses: DOJ Edition

By Kathryn Rubino on May 18, 2026 1:47 pm

Welp, here’s a thing that happened. The Department of Justice — the nation’s largest law office, nominally the guardian of the rule of law — filed a notice of supplemental authority in its New Hampshire voter roll case. Except the exhibit attached to that filing had nothing to do with New Hampshire. Instead of the document it intended to attach, DOJ filed an unrelated January letter about Minnesota’s same-day voter registration system, a document from its Minnesota voter roll case, a completely separate lawsuit filed against a completely different state. Hours later, DOJ quietly acknowledged the error and filed a “notice of errata.” Whoops.

This is the kind of mistake that a first-year associate would be sweating through the night over. Except this isn’t a stressed-out junior associate at a Biglaw firm. This is the Department of Justice of the United States of America, currently suing 30 states simultaneously in a sprawling campaign to seize unredacted voter rolls containing voters’ Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and birthdates. And they can’t keep their own cases straight.

Now, in isolation, filing the wrong exhibit and catching it hours later is embarrassing but survivable. Lawyers are human; mistakes happen. But this isn’t happening in isolation. Not even close.

Democracy Docket has documented dozens of errors in the department’s voter roll campaign alone, including asking the wrong state officials for election records, leaving draft comments in official court filings, and countless misspellings and grammatical errors. The agency spent months emailing the wrong address in Oklahoma to demand voter rolls, and sent demand letters to the wrong state officials in Rhode Island and Wisconsin. And just last month, the Civil Rights Division filed a 14-page motion with a giant “DRAFT” watermark plastered diagonally across every single page. You truly cannot make this up.

So what’s actually going on here? I’d submit it’s not complicated. We’ve written extensively about the brain drain hollowing out the DOJ. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved, with an estimated 5,500 people having left the department, either voluntarily, by accepting buyouts, or by being fired. Roughly 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division’s attorneys — the very division running these voter roll cases under Harmeet Dhillon — quit, were reassigned, or accepted deferred resignation in the first months of the second Trump administration. The once elite legal employer has taken to begging for applicants on social media like scammy work-from-anywhere jobs. But when career prosecutors have been asked to drop corruption cases as part of political bargains, sign off on dubiously motivated prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies, or otherwise help run a machine that increasingly treats court orders and the Constitution as optional suggestions, this is what you get. Turns out a lot of seasoned attorneys would rather not do any of that.

The irony here is almost too thick. The entire premise of this sprawling litigation is that states can’t be trusted to maintain accurate voter rolls. The DOJ can’t accurately maintain which documents belong in which of its own cases. Perhaps before demanding that 30 states clean up their records, the Justice Department might want to get its own files in order.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1