By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, Oct 9 (Reuters) – A US judge ruled on Friday that the Justice Department’s push to obtain state voter rolls and check them against a federal immigration database to demand that states remove voters it deemed ineligible was unlawful.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s decision marked the latest setback for President Donald Trump’s push to expand federal control over election administration ahead of the November 3 midterms, with his Republican Party battling to hold majorities in both houses of Congress.
In a 78-page decision siding with a challenge to the Justice Department’s practice brought by watchdog group Common Cause, Sooknanan wrote that the Justice Department had downplayed the risk that its practice would wrongfully disenfranchise eligible US citizens despite evidence that the immigration database, known as SAVE, could be inaccurate.
“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,” wrote Sooknanan, who is based in Washington and was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden.
SUPREME COURT PAUSED PREVIOUS RULING
Ming Cheung, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who represented the plaintiffs, said in a statement, “Today’s ruling makes clear that the administration cannot use the federal government to disrupt elections.”
The Justice Department is reviewing the decision, a spokesperson said.
In a separate case, Sooknanan blocked the Trump administration in June from using an expanded version of the SAVE database to check the accuracy of voter rolls. The US Supreme Court temporarily paused that decision last month.
Federal election law prohibits the systematic review of voter rolls in the 90 days before any federal election, potentially blunting the impact of both Sooknanan’s decision and the Supreme Court’s pause of her previous order on the upcoming midterms.
LATEST DEFEAT FOR JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Trump, who falsely claims his loss in the 2020 presidential election was due to voter fraud, ordered the Justice Department last year to crack down on voting by ineligible people, despite multiple state audits and independent studies showing such voter fraud is rare.
The Justice Department then demanded that nearly all 50 states hand over their complete, unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive information such as voters’ Social Security numbers or dates of birth.
Eighteen mostly Republican-led states complied. After receiving the voter data, the Justice Department ran it through SAVE and alerted states to voters found to be non-citizens so the states could remove them.
Sooknanan said the Trump administration’s expansion of SAVE meant it now contained citizenship data from the Social Security Administration, which could be outdated, meaning many immigrants who had since been naturalized as US citizens would still be flagged as non-citizens.
The Justice Department sued 30 Democratic-led and Republican states that refused to hand over their unredacted voter rolls, as well as Washington, DC. It has lost 26 of those cases so far, without winning one.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Rod Nickel)
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