Federal judge rules against Trump DoJ’s policy of collecting state voter rolls

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the US justice department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check them against a federal immigration database is unlawful.

The ruling, by the US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was a setback for Donald Trump, who has pushed his administration to ramp up investigations into non-citizen voting ahead of the November midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.

The department’s list maintenance policy, adopted to comply with the president’s election integrity executive order, violated privacy laws and risked disenfranchising voters, Sooknanan said.

“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,” Sooknanan wrote in the 78-page ruling.

Sooknanan said the policy not only violated federal laws, but also that the justice department did not have the authority to enact it because Congress gave the states, not the federal government, control over the maintenance of their voter rolls.

“Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

Sooknanan wrote that her ruling “does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls” and did not prevent states from maintaining their own.

Sooknanan previously ruled against the administration in June, limiting the its ability to create a database of Americans’ information. The US supreme court later temporarily set aside her decision.

The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit, brought by the government watchdog group Common Cause, came after the justice department requested voter information from states in May.

Roughly 18 states complied, handing over information that included voters’ full names, birth dates, residential addresses, and state driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their social security numbers.

Sooknanan said the department “improperly” disclosed and maintained records.

The administration wanted voter roll information to compare with immigration data, to ensure non-citizens are not registered to vote.

But Sooknanan said the justice department “failed to consider the risk that its use of citizenship records known to be unreliable would lead the civil rights division to demand that states remove US citizens from their voter rolls”.

In her ruling, she cited two people who had been incorrectly removed from their state’s voter roll list because they had been wrongly identified as non-citizens.

“This is a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice. It’s time the Trump administration stop these desperate attempts to seize voters’ private data and take control of our elections,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause.