Follow-Up: Judge Orders Justice Department to Stop Threatening Election Officials Over Noncitizen Voter List
U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson on Friday issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the Trump administration's demands related to voting by alleged non-citizens, Reuters reported. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by election workers' unions and other groups, days before next week's midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
Thompson wrote that the public has a paramount interest in ensuring that election officials and workers are able to carry out their work in accordance with federal law and election procedure, and that with the official day of the elections only a couple of days away, the balance of the equities and the public interest weighed in the plaintiffs' favor. She ordered the administration to refrain from demanding that local election officials remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse ballots to specific voters, or segregate ballots cast in the midterm elections, based on a Trump administration list of alleged non-citizen voters.
In the months leading up to the midterms, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive approach to election oversight, pressing states for voter-registration data and saying stricter measures are needed to ensure election security and public confidence in the vote. Reuters reported that Thompson found the Justice Department had gone too far this month when it threatened to prosecute state and county officials who do not cooperate with its election-related initiatives. The Justice Department had no immediate comment on the ruling.
The order is the latest turn in a running legal fight: the Justice Department had earlier written to California county officials demanding that suspected noncitizen ballots be segregated, warning that knowingly counting them could bring criminal liability, and on October 30 it issued grand jury subpoenas to California election officials seeking records on how they detect unlawful voting. Thompson's order means the federal government cannot, before midterm voting is complete, use that list and the threat of prosecution to press local officials to change how ballots are handled.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于 Oakland 的 Ronald V. Dellums 联邦大楼。Sanfranman59，CC BY 2.0，经维基共享资源。 / The Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland. By Sanfranman59, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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