A US federal judge has ruled that the Justice Department acted unlawfully when it collected state voter rolls and checked them against a federal immigration database. The decision is a setback for the Trump administration weeks before the midterm elections, though its practical effect before the vote may be limited.
A United States judge has ruled that the Justice Department unlawfully sought state voter rolls in order to check them against a federal immigration database, Al Jazeera reported, citing Reuters.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the decision on Friday, October 9.
The Ruling
In a 78-page ruling in favour of the watchdog group Common Cause, the judge found that the administration had understated the risk of wrongly removing eligible citizens from voter rolls.
The problem, she said, lies in inaccuracies in the database used, known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). It could contain outdated citizenship records and so misidentify naturalised US citizens.
“The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” she wrote, adding that Congress had left that authority to the states.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling.
What the Department Did
Last year, President Donald Trump directed the department to crack down on voting by ineligible people. Research shows that voter fraud is rare.
The department then demanded unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive personal information, from nearly all 50 states.
- 18 states, mostly Republican-led, complied
- Their data was checked against SAVE, and people identified as non-citizens were flagged for possible removal
- The department sued 30 states and Washington, DC, for refusing
- 26 of those cases have been dismissed
Reaction
Ming Cheung, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said the ruling made clear that the administration could not use the federal government to disrupt elections.
“The Trump administration has repeatedly taken extreme measures to interfere with how elections are run, undermine confidence in the results, and create confusion,” he said.
How Much Will Change
The ruling’s practical effect before the November 3 vote may be limited. Federal law already bars systematic purges of voter rolls in the 90 days before a federal election.
The legal picture is also unsettled. In a separate case in June, the same judge blocked expanded use of the SAVE database for voter roll checks. The US Supreme Court temporarily paused that order last month.
Image: Voting booths in Des Moines, Iowa, on election day in 2022 (file photo). Photo by Phil Roeder via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.