A federal judge on Thursday rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s attempt to compel Vermont to hand over sensitive voter-registration data, leaving Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas in control of the state’s voter file as the November midterm election approaches. U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Lanthier’s September 17 decision denied the federal demand, and VTDigger reported that the case was dismissed.
The dispute began after federal officials asked Vermont in August 2025 for information from its statewide voter list, including names, addresses and driver’s-license data. Copeland Hanzas refused, arguing that disclosure would conflict with state privacy protections; the Justice Department then sued in December. WCAX’s account of the filing said federal lawyers characterized Vermont’s refusal as defiance of federal civil-rights law, while state officials maintained that the requested transfer was not authorized.
Lanthier’s ruling means Vermont does not have to produce the records under the Justice Department’s current legal theory. The judge said her conclusion was consistent with decisions from other courts confronting similar federal demands, according to the state-focused report on the decision. The result is significant because the underlying file can contain more than the public-facing voter information commonly available for election administration; state officials said the requested material included home addresses, birth dates, Social Security information and driver’s-license numbers.
For Vermont voters, Thursday’s practical outcome is continuity: registration records remain with state election administrators while any appeal proceeds, and the ruling itself does not change eligibility rules, registration deadlines or voting methods.
Copeland Hanzas and Attorney General Charity Clark said the decision protected both voter privacy and Vermont’s authority to administer elections. Their position is that local election officials and the secretary of state already maintain the rolls through established state processes. The Justice Department has framed its multistate data campaign as an election-integrity effort intended to identify ineligible registrations and noncitizen voting. WCAX reported Thursday that the administration had pursued voter information from multiple states, making the Vermont judgment part of a broader federal-state conflict rather than a one-off records case.
The decision does not necessarily end the litigation. A Justice Department spokesperson told VTDigger that federal lawyers were reviewing the ruling and would likely appeal. Unless a higher court changes the result, however, Vermont election administrators can continue preparing for the midterms without transferring the disputed data set.
The ruling also arrives after a separate voter-list problem inside Vermont. Copeland Hanzas and Gov. Phil Scott said last month that the state removed nearly 900 people who had been wrongly registered because of data mistakenly shared by the Department of Motor Vehicles, according to the same report. That episode gives the state an immediate administrative reason to keep auditing its list, but it does not alter Thursday’s legal conclusion about the federal government’s authority to obtain protected voter data.
