DOJ Asks Court to Stay Voter-Roll Ruling Pending Appeal, Saying the Vacated "Policy" Does Not Exist
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday night asked a federal court to stay, pending appeal, a ruling that last week vacated its practice of collecting complete state voter rolls and comparing them against federal databases to identify alleged noncitizen registrants, according to News Beep's report on the court filing.
On October 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the District of Columbia issued a 78-page opinion in Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 26-cv-1352, vacating what the court record calls the DOJ "Voter List Maintenance Policy." The court held that none of the statutes the department cited — the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 — authorizes such a program, and that the department also violated the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act. The court found that citizenship data in the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE database, which DOJ used to screen the rolls, can be outdated, so naturalized citizens may be wrongly flagged. "DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people," Sooknanan wrote.
According to the opinion, the department's Civil Rights Division began in May 2025 sending letters to 49 states and the District of Columbia demanding complete, unredacted voter files, including full names, dates of birth, home addresses and driver's license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers. At least 18 states handed over their files. The department shared the lists with other federal agencies, ran them against SAVE and pressed states to remove flagged voters. It sued the 30 states and the District of Columbia that refused to provide the data, and has so far lost 26 of those cases and won none.
"The Department of Justice and Attorney General Blanche respectfully move for a stay pending appeal of this Court's order vacating the alleged 'DOJ Voter List Maintenance Policy,'" Friday's filing reads. "There is no such policy. By concluding otherwise, the Court's decision has hamstrung DOJ's ability to enforce the election laws that Congress has empowered it to enforce." The department also argued that its requests were not reviewable "final agency actions" because states were not legally mandated to comply: "States had the option to provide the requested information; many did, many did not," and the letters, framed as requests for states to "please" provide information, did not "require anyone to do anything." The district court had found the requests mandatory because of the threats of legal consequences in the letters.
The plaintiffs are the voting-rights group Common Cause and four individual voters. The ruling is an appealable final order, issued weeks before the November 3 midterm elections. (GSM, from court filings)
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Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：官方缺席选票投递箱资料照片。照片：Cliffordsnow，Wikimedia Commons，CC BY-SA 4.0。Photo: an official ballot drop box (file photo). Photo by Cliffordsnow via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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