Federal judge dismisses right-wing Hawaii voter registration lawsuit, but lets group try again

A federal court partially dismissed a right-wing group’s attempt to gain access to Hawaii’s voter registration records, finding that some of the claims were not yet mature.

On June 28, a federal judge partially granted and partially denied the state’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) seeking to invalidate Hawaii’s voter information protections. PILF has until Oct. 28 to cure the deficiencies in its lawsuit or it will be dismissed for good.

PILF challenged Hawaii’s voter registration law, which requires counties to maintain an electronic voter registration system with the name and precinct or district designation of each registered voter. The law also requires counties to keep confidential any other information taken from a voter’s registration.

According to the lawsuit, in 2023, PILF filed a request for complete state voter registration data, but the Secretary of State’s office failed to fulfill it because the state delegates responsibility for maintaining voter records to counties. PILF argues that this violates the public disclosure provision of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires all states to maintain a publicly available statewide record of registered voters, rather than separate private voter records for each county.

PILF’s lawsuit also claims that the state’s policy of releasing registration data only for elections or governmental operations violates the NVRA, which requires statewide voter rolls to be available to the general public.

In response to the right-wing group’s lawsuit — similar to seven other active voting rights lawsuits the group has filed in other states — Hawaii asked the court to dismiss the case.

The judge granted the state’s motion in part, writing that PILF had brought the case too early because it had filed an informal application with the state’s chief election officer but had not completed a county application for voter information. For that reason, the court found that PILF had not suffered the prejudice that would be required for PILF to have standing and allowed the case to proceed.

Read the order here.

You can read more about this case here.