(MENAFN) The U.S. Department of Justice took legal action Thursday against six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—accusing them of breaching federal election laws by withholding comprehensive voter registration data.

“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi asserted in a statement. “Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure—states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court,” she added.

The Department claims that these states only provided publicly available voter data and failed to submit more detailed information, including driver's license and Social Security numbers, despite formal requests made under the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act.

The lawsuits follow a directive from President Donald Trump's Executive Order No. 14248, signed on March 25, which mandates the DOJ to verify voter eligibility and ensure voting systems are equipped with “a voter-verifiable paper record to prevent fraud or mistake.”

However, state officials have pushed back against the accusations. Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, argued in an August statement that state law prohibited full compliance with the request. “This request, and reported efforts to collect broad data on millions of Americans, represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process,” Schmidt remarked.

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts across each of the six states.

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