The New Republic67%
Trump Loses 13th Straight Attempt to Get State Voter Rolls 69%
By Robert McCoy93%
7/13/2026, 9:00:48 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 4 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Politically Left Leaning Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 32.6% saturation with 95 hits. Analysis detected 272 faulty-reasoning hits from 291 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.9% and a BS Rank of 69% (4,752 of 15,282 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 68.90% of the article peer group.
The Trump administration’s Justice Department has filed 31 federal lawsuits seeking to force 30 states and Washington, D.C., to hand over their unredacted voter rolls.
As of Monday afternoon, its record is 0-13 .
On Monday, Judge Thomas E.
Johnston of the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia dismissed the federal government’s attempt to acquire sensitive voter information from the state.
The judge, an appointee of George W.
Bush, ruled that the Trump administration’s demand was legally deficient.
It failed to provide a “factual basis” and “statement of purpose,” as are required by the statute invoked by the administration, Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
For that reason, he wrote, the government had “failed to state a claim.”
The growing string of defeats suggests the administration is simply throwing lawsuits against the wall to see what sticks.
None have so far.
In the 13 rulings against the administration thus far, judges appointed by various presidents, including Donald Trump himself, shot down his administration’s attempts to acquire voter data—which anti-authoritarian advocacy group Protect Democracy has described as “an unprecedented and unconstitutional incursion” that seeks to set the stage for “purges of eligible voters, election subversion in 2026, and the invasion of fundamental privacy rights.”
A scathing footnote in Johnston’s ruling lays bare the groundlessness of the Trump administration’s crusade: “Given the lack of an adequate basis or purpose, one is left to wonder what the real purpose was for the Justice Department to go to the trouble of filing civil actions like this one all around the nation,” the judge wrote.
“Troubling though this question is, it is not before the Court at this time.”
Speakers
1speaker9.3%attributed speech264writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
0%flagged-word coverageJudge Thomas E. Johnston
27 attributed words100% of attributed speech59% writer coverage
Biased Writer Voice-32.6 pts
Writer 33%Judge Thomas E. Johnston 0%
Politically Left Leaning Bias-27.3 pts
Writer 27%Judge Thomas E. Johnston 0%
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.