The Center for Election Confidence (CEC) today filed an amicus brief in Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Schmidt (No. 25-379), urging the Supreme Court to grant review and overturn Third Circuit’s decision to severely undermine the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) mandatory public-inspection regime for federal elections.

The brief explains that Congress wrote the NVRA deliberately to include public oversight of election officials’ compliance with the law in federal elections, noting that NVRA requires officials to “make available for public inspection” all records related to voter-roll maintenance and that the Third Circuit’s refusal to recognize the denial of those records as a concrete injury subverts the underlying purpose of the statute.

The NVRA was enacted to “increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote” while simultaneously ensuring “accurate and current voter registration rolls.” Congress made transparency a central part of achieving those goals by creating a public right of inspection (and use), declaring that list maintenance records “must be made available for public inspection and, where available, photocopying at reasonable costs.”

The NVRA’s public disclosure provision is indispensable, and the whole of the NVRA fails without it.

Congress intended these list maintenance records to be available so that the public could itself confirm officials’ compliance with the law, fomenting confidence in federal elections. And, CEC argues—contrary to the Third Circuit’s opinion below—that an official’s failure or refusal to effect such public disclosure constitutes a judicially cognizable injury in fact.

CEC argues that established Supreme Court precedent already resolves this question, and that the Third Circuit failed to apply governing precedent to this case.

The brief points to Public Citizen v. Department of Justice and FEC v. Akins as controlling, explaining that those cases hold that a plaintiff suffers an injury in fact when a statute requires information to be made public and the plaintiff is denied access to it. The brief quotes Akins for the proposition that a person’s “inability to obtain information” when Congress mandated such information be disclosed is a valid “injury in fact”. Here, Congress intentionally created a transparency regime enabling public oversight of voter-list maintenance, placing this case squarely within the ambit of Public Citizen and Akins.

The brief rejects the Third Circuit’s reliance on TransUnion v. Ramirez, arguing that TransUnion addressed private credit-reporting injuries and distinguished itself from public-disclosure cases like Akins and Public Citizen. According to CEC, courts misinterpret TransUnion when they require plaintiffs seeking records under public-access statutes to show additional, “downstream” harms. It warns that reading such a requirement into the NVRA would “nullify” not only the NVRA but also other federal transparency frameworks, including FOIA and FACA, because no requester can explain such further harms associated with missing records until after the records have been unlawfully withheld.

This reasoning is circular and too clever by half: how can a requester, such as PILF, know what is exactly in the records being kept secret? No one knows exactly what the information will show until it gets it.

CEC also argues that even apart from informational injury, the refusal to disclose NVRA-mandated records inflicts a separate First Amendment injury, because it prevents organizations and citizens from studying, analyzing, publishing, and speaking about a state’s voter-roll maintenance activities. The brief reminds the Court that the Constitution protects the “right to receive information and ideas,” and cites the Court’s recognition of the public’s right “to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus.” The public’s ability to engage in this sort of protected speech depends on its access to a state’s list-maintenance data, and the denial of access directly prevents such speech.

Finally, CEC highlights the practical consequences of the ruling. It notes that Public Interest Legal Foundation used voter-list data in six states in 2025 alone to identify inaccuracies, and explains that under the Third Circuit’s approach, similar oversight work would be impossible. If the public cannot enforce the NVRA’s transparency requirement, then no one can ensure that states are complying with the law.

By restricting access to NVRA information to only certain groups who promise to use it for the government-approved reasons, the panel’s approach invites—indeed ensures—that public debate is tilted entirely in one direction.

CEC urges the Supreme Court to grant review in PILF v. Schmidt and reverse, lest the NVRA’s public-inspection right and accountability mechanism collapse.

The Center for Election Confidence thanks Bradley A. Benbrook and Stephen M. Duvernay of Benbrook Law Group for their representation in this matter.