LEXINGTON, Ky. — Voting rights organizations launched a federal lawsuit Tuesday to block the Trump administration's unprecedented effort to collect sensitive personal information on millions of American voters, arguing that the Justice Department is building a dangerous centralized national voter list ahead of November's midterm elections.

Common Cause and four individual voters filed the lawsuit in Washington D.C., seeking to block the DOJ from obtaining and analyzing unredacted state voter lists that include driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The suit asks the court to order the Justice Department to halt any actions to compile, use or disclose sensitive voter data and to delete information already in its possession.

The legal challenge comes as the DOJ has sued Kentucky and dozens of other states for their voter registration records. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, has refused to provide unredacted voter data without a court order, citing state privacy protections. Jefferson County Clerk David Yates, a Democrat, also filed a motion to intervene in Kentucky's lawsuit to protect voters' sensitive information.

The DOJ has already obtained data from at least a dozen states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. The department plans to share the collected data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates the SAVE program—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements—to search for potential noncitizen voters.

Election officials and voting rights advocates argue that the SAVE program has serious flaws. A North Carolina audit found that 97.6% of people flagged as noncitizens by the system were actually citizens. Common Cause and its legal partners contend that relying on such flawed databases to identify voters for purges will inevitably result in the disenfranchisement of millions of eligible Americans.

Federal judges have so far rejected the Justice Department's efforts in five states. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Rhode Island last week dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit, ruling that federal voting laws do not authorize the Justice Department to demand unredacted state voter data. The DOJ has appealed several of those rulings, with oral arguments scheduled for mid-May.

The Trump administration maintains that accurate voter rolls are essential for election integrity. The Justice Department has not yet responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit.