The Justice Department found itself red-faced after a court filing was riddled with basic spelling errors.
An emergency motion filed to the 6th District Court by the Department of Justice last week failed to spell multiple basic words correctly, spelling voters as “votors,” United States as “United Staes,” and emergency as “emeregency.”
The emergency appeal was filed after a Michigan judge refused to force the state to hand over records that contained personal voter information such as dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers.
The Trump administration is attempting to force states to hand over personal information on tens of millions of voters across the country ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The DOJ has defended the outreach, arguing that full access to the data is necessary to enforce federal statutes that require states to keep their voter rolls current and free of ineligible registrations.
But many states, including Republican-led states, have refused, arguing that the DOJ is overstepping, and that handing over detailed personal data could let the federal government identify and remove voters the state hasn’t flagged.
A Republican election official, speaking anonymously to avoid White House backlash, told CNN last month that they feared the data could be used for immigration enforcement or to cast doubt on midterm election results.
“If states don’t give this information and then Republicans lose and they can go back and say, ‘See, it’s because they didn’t give us this information, so they cheated and all these illegal people that shouldn’t have been voting voted,’” the official said.
Since September, the DOJ has filed lawsuits against 24 states that declined to share the records.
Meanwhile, the latest filing is hardly an isolated embarrassment.
In recent months, Justice Department lawyers have stumbled over elementary details in multiple court cases. In April, attorneys misspelled “United States” in a case involving the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Months later, former prosecutor Lindsey Halligan incorrectly listed New York Attorney General Letitia James’s address as “Brooklyn, New Jersey” in a legal document.
And just last week, when the DOJ filed suit against New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, her name was repeatedly spelled wrong throughout the complaint.
The DOJ has also been under fire in recent weeks for errors it made in the latest release of the Epstein files.
When the records were initially made public, they contained a range of material that appeared to fall short of standard redaction practices. According to a CNN review, the release included videos in which women’s faces were clearly visible, nearly 100 unredacted nude images, photographs of young women’s faces, images involving minors, and documents identifying a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse. One court filing reportedly allowed redacted text to be uncovered simply by copying and pasting it.
The trove also featured a 2009 undercover FBI video tied to efforts to obtain Epstein’s so-called “black book” of contacts, with the agent’s face unobscured.
Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act—passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in late November— the Justice Department is required to withhold sexually explicit material and information that could identify victims.
Even so, the department has faced criticism for heavily blacking out names of individuals alleged to have assisted Epstein, prompting accusations that its redaction standards have been inconsistently applied.
"WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 18: The Department of Justice (DOJ) building on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)"
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesA DOJ spokesperson has said that fully redacted names belong to victims, FBI personnel, or other law enforcement officials.
“In many instances, as it has been well documented publicly, those who were originally victims became participants and co-conspirators,” the official said. “We did not redact any names of men, only female victims.”
Justice Department leaders have acknowledged mistakes in the Epstein document release, but said errors were quickly corrected.
“Mistakes were made by—you have really hard-working lawyers that worked for the past 60 days. Think about this though: you’re talking about pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said: “We were given 30 days to review and redact and unredact millions of pages of documents, our error rate is very low.”
