A Virginia-based legal nonprofit has challenged Oklahoma’s new law on voter registration data, saying it discriminates against out-of-state residents and impedes its work fact-checking voter rolls.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oklahoma City, comes after the Trump administration sued Oklahoma and 29 other states for access to the nonpublic files behind state voter registration data. Attorney General Gentner Drummond settled that federal lawsuit in March and provided Oklahoma data to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Attorneys for the Public Interest Legal Foundation said Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 1086 conflicts with a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act. SB 1086 made several changes to voting laws, including new requirements for public records requests for access to the state’s voter registration list.
Before the law changed in 2025, anyone could get access to the public voter registration list if they filled out a form with the state Election Board. Now, requesters must be both Oklahoma residents and U.S. citizens. Alternatively, they can be a candidate for office or an official representative of a political party. Limits on the commercial use of such data remain in place.
The foundation’s attorneys said it received copies of Oklahoma’s voter data before the law changed in 2025 and used it in a 2020 national report about dead voters and duplicate voters. The foundation said it is working on an updated version of the report.
“Defendant is preventing the foundation from proposing best practices and solutions that will assist Oklahoma in carrying out its voter list maintenance programs and activities to help ensure Oklahoma’s voter roll is accurate and current,” the foundation said in its June 16 complaint.
The foundation also said the updated Oklahoma law sets up different categories of the public and goes against the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
“There is no rational basis for limiting full access to the Statewide Voter Registration List to Oklahoma residents and partisan individuals and organizations, especially where federal law grants rights to the ‘public,’” the complaint said.
In denying the foundation’s request for the data, Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said the Legislature exercised its authority to limit access to voter registration lists. He said the election board disagreed that a denial would violate the National Voter Registration Act.
“In Oklahoma’s case, the Legislature’s action enhances election integrity by helping to prevent foreigners and bad actors from gaining access to Oklahoma’s electronic voter list, while ensuring access by U.S. citizens who are Oklahoma residents, candidates and political parties,” Ziriax said in a May 8 letter.
The Oklahoma attorney general’s office, which is defending SB 1086 on behalf of Ziriax, echoed those arguments in its response to the lawsuit. It said the foundation could only show an informational injury, not a concrete injury that would justify a lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton will hear arguments from both sides in a hearing Nov. 10. Heaton cast doubt Monday over the practical nature of the dispute in an order scheduling the hearing.
“If an electronic copy of the desired statewide voter registration list must be made available, free of charge, to any bona fide resident of Oklahoma who is a citizen of the United States — a class which includes millions of people — and such residents may share the list with others so long as not for a commercial or advertising purpose or with a foreign entity, then why can’t plaintiff access the list for its stated purposes through its local counsel or some other Oklahoma resident?” Heaton asked.
Trump Administration Sues Over Voter Registration Data
To find suspected noncitizens on state voter rolls, Trump administration officials sought full, unredacted voter rolls from 49 states and the District of Columbia. Some states complied, but the Justice Department sued 30 states, including Oklahoma, over access to the data.
Federal judges in 26 states and DC dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuits, ruling that the federal government overstepped its power by trying to consolidate voter data nationally. The Justice Department is appealing most of those dismissed cases.
The Trump administration said it wants to use the state voter data to match against existing data collected to check immigration and citizenship status for government assistance programs like Medicaid and food stamps and state vocational licenses. The data is maintained by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
But some states said data inside the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program is oftentimes outdated and not a reliable check for current citizenship or naturalization status. They fear the federal government may try to remove eligible voters from state voter rolls using the outdated information.
The federal government flagged 16,000 voters in Nevada as possibly ineligible based on checks through the SAVE database. After state officials investigated, 185 required further verification. All of them were found to be U.S. citizens.
Drummond settled the federal lawsuit against Oklahoma early in the process. So far, Oklahoma has been the only state to settle, according to a case tracker by the Brennan Center for Justice.
In a written statement, the attorney general’s office said it chose to negotiate. In doing so, the attorney general said it secured enforceable terms rather than leaving the result to a court.
“Through direct negotiation, we reached an agreement that protects two things Oklahomans expect without compromise: elections conducted with the highest integrity and strong safeguards for voters’ personal data,” the statement said.
The state’s settlement agreement allows the federal government to make as many requests for Oklahoma’s voter registration list as it wants. So far, it has only received the initial file in March, according to the Election Board and attorney general’s office.
The state Election Board has a memorandum of understanding to check Oklahoma voters against the federal SAVE database, said spokeswoman Misha Mohr. The U.S. Supreme Court recently lifted a stay in a lawsuit that blocked those types of checks.
“So far, only a limited number of individual checks have been conducted by the state Election Board using the SAVE system,” Mohr said in an email.
In the past month, the federal government demanded California drop 20,000 ballots it said were likely from ineligible voters after checking their names against the SAVE database. After a legal challenge by civil rights groups, a federal appeals court ruled against the federal government this week and sent the case back to a federal district court in California.
Paul Monies has been a reporter with Oklahoma Watch since 2017 and covers state agencies and public health. Contact him at (571) 319-3289 or pmonies@oklahomawatch.org. Follow him on Twitter @pmonies.
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