Judge strikes down Justice Department voter-roll policy

A federal judge on Friday struck down a Justice Department policy that collected unredacted state voter rolls and checked them against federal immigration records, ruling that the government broke privacy laws and risked removing eligible Americans from the rolls.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the department lacked authority to carry out the policy because Congress had left voter-roll maintenance to the states. Her 78-page ruling sided with Common Cause, a government watchdog group that challenged the department’s actions.

“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.”

The ruling is a setback for President Donald Trump’s push to expand investigations into voting by noncitizens ahead of the November midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake. The policy was adopted to comply with his election integrity executive order. The administration wanted to compare voter rolls with immigration records to identify people it considered ineligible to vote.

The Justice Department requested voter information from states beginning in May. About 18 states complied, providing records that included voters’ full names, birth dates, residential addresses and either state driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers, according to The Guardian. Al Jazeera reported that the states were mostly Republican-led and that the department flagged people identified as noncitizens for potential removal.

Sooknanan found that the department had improperly disclosed and maintained records. She also said it had failed to account for the risk of relying on inaccurate citizenship information in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE. Outdated records could incorrectly identify naturalized US citizens as noncitizens, Al Jazeera reported. The judge cited two people who had been wrongly removed from a state voter roll after being incorrectly identified as noncitizens.

“The court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more,” Sooknanan wrote. She said the ruling did not stop the federal government from lawfully helping states keep accurate rolls or prevent states from maintaining their own lists.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling, according to Al Jazeera. Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause’s president and chief executive, called the decision “a victory for voters.”

Al Jazeera reported that the department has also sued 30 states and Washington, DC, over refusals to provide voter data, and that 26 of those cases have been dismissed. In a separate case in June, Sooknanan restricted expanded use of the SAVE database for voter-roll checks; the Supreme Court later temporarily paused that order. Federal law bars systematic voter-roll purges during the 90 days before a federal election, Al Jazeera reported.