Federal Judge Vacates DOJ's Nationwide Voter-Roll Dragnet, Citing Risk of Disenfranchising U.S. Citizens
A federal judge on Friday struck down the Justice Department's nationwide campaign to seize state voter rolls and run them against a federal immigration database, delivering the most consequential judicial defeat yet to the Trump administration's effort to insert the federal government into election administration.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia, in a 78-page opinion, vacated the department's voter-list maintenance policy under the Administrative Procedure Act. She ruled that none of the laws the DOJ invoked — the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act, or the Help America Vote Act — authorized the nationwide regime, and she accused the department of running "roughshod" over longstanding civil rights laws carefully crafted to protect Americans' rights.
The challenged operation began with executive directives ordering the attorney general to pursue states that refused to surrender complete voter records. The department demanded unredacted files from 49 states and Washington, D.C. — including dates of birth, home addresses, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers — and checked them against the SAVE immigration database to demand that states remove voters it deemed ineligible.
Sooknanan found the department had downplayed the risk that SAVE could misidentify eligible U.S. citizens as noncitizens, writing that the policy "has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more." She also sharply rejected the DOJ's argument that people on voter rolls could be treated as "subjects" of voter-fraud investigations, calling that interpretation "nonsensical." The ruling immediately halts the program nationwide and bars the department from transferring voter records to the Department of Homeland Security or running state rolls against federal enforcement databases.
The decision, brought by Common Cause and registered voters, notes that at least 25 federal district courts had already dismissed the department's separate voter-roll enforcement cases. In a separate case, Sooknanan had also blocked the administration from using an expanded version of the SAVE database to check voter roll accuracy — a decision the Supreme Court has temporarily paused. The department is expected to appeal.
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Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于华盛顿特区的 E. Barrett Prettyman 联邦法院大楼（本案由哥伦比亚特区联邦地区法院审理）。摄影：Toohool，CC BY-SA 4.0，来源：Wikimedia Commons
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