A federal judge has struck down the Trump administration’s plan to check state voter rolls against federal immigration databases, a blow to the administration’s election-related efforts in the run-up to the midterms.
In a 78-page ruling, D.C.-based U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote Friday that the Justice Department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.”
The Trump administration has mounted a nationwide push to obtain complete voter rolls from every state, including sensitive information about registered voters. The Justice Department has argued the information is needed to ensure states are complying with two federal voting laws — the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act — which aim to ensure states have programs in place for maintaining accurate voter rolls.
Eighteen states fully cooperated with the Justice Department’s request for voter files, Sooknanan said. The department has brought lawsuits against most other states, and has lost almost all of the suits, according to a CBS News analysis. One state settled with the federal government.
The ruling applies to the voter files that the Justice Department has already received, as well as the files it is still litigating over.
Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department’s argument that it has legal authority to demand voter lists, compare those lists against citizenship databases and urge states to remove voters who it claims are ineligible to vote. The judge also said the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act, and said the federal databases could contain “inaccuracies.”
“Today’s decision does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls. Neither does it prevent states from maintaining their own voter rolls. And to state the obvious, the Court’s decision does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections,” Sooknanan wrote. “Rather, the Court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more — a policy that flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans.”
She continued: “The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”
The legal challenge against the voter roll policy was brought by advocacy group Common Cause and individual voters.
Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón called the ruling “a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice” in a statement Friday.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the decision.
Under the Trump administration, the federal government has sought a larger-than-usual role in elections, which are typically administered by states with some regulation by Congress. President Trump argues more federal scrutiny is necessary in order to prevent noncitizens from voting and curb fraud — though most election experts say fraud and noncitizen voting are extremely rare.
The government’s push to run state voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database has faced court setbacks, as more than two dozen judges have denied the Justice Department’s requests to compel individual states to share their voter lists.
Sooknanan also ruled in June that the Trump administration’s overhauled SAVE database — which includes data from the Social Security Administration — was created unlawfully. The Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling last month.
In practice, the impact of recent court rulings on the November midterms could be limited as federal law bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their voter registration lists within 90 days of an election.
Another Trump administration policy that set new rules for the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of mail-in ballots was also blocked in the courts, with the Supreme Court declining the government’s request to allow the rules to take effect.
