OPINION:
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee and former principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, recently accused the Trump administration of turning civil rights laws “on their heads.”
Federal efforts to obtain state voter rolls to cross-check names against citizenship databases with the intent of removing registrants who did not belong violated civil rights laws, which exist to get more people to vote, Judge Sooknanan said.
That framing misstates both history and principle. Civil rights law, as it pertains to voting, is supposed to protect the integrity of elections and the legitimate franchise.
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Eligible citizens have an absolute right to cast a vote and have it counted equally with others. The purpose of the law is not to maximize the raw number of ballots cast regardless of eligibility or accuracy, despite Judge Sooknanan’s interpretation.
Preventing ineligible people from voting, stopping people from voting more than once and blocking ballots cast in another person’s name are not attacks on the franchise. They are essential to preserving it.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted to end a pattern of discrimination against eligible Black voters that prevented them from casting ballots. That is directly in line with the 15th Amendment’s command that the right to vote not be denied or abridged on account of race.
None of this relates to an abstract expansion of turnout. Equal access was meant for those already entitled to participate, to prevent exclusion or dilution of their votes. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still prohibits practices that deny or abridge any citizen’s right to vote on account of race.
The protected interest in these cases is citizens’ equal right to have their votes count. Adding ineligible ballots dilutes that right for every eligible voter.
Accurate voter rolls are essential to fulfilling that duty. Federal and state laws have long required list maintenance precisely because inflated rolls enable ballots cast by the dead, double voting and registration by noncitizens. Citizenship is a bright-line eligibility rule for federal elections.
Blocking noncitizens, nonresidents and people voting under another’s identity does not disenfranchise anyone, since those ballots are illegally cast in the first place. Due process matters. Notice and an opportunity to cure errors are required, as is protection against flawed data.
The remedy for errors, including the accidental removal of eligible voters from the lists, is a better, more transparent process.
Judge Sooknanan’s view treats removal as hostile to civil rights. That inverts the logic. Every ballot cast by an ineligible person cancels, in effect, the vote of an eligible citizen.
The people whose only metric is the number of ballots cast — regardless of whether the caster is a citizen, alive or voting once — are not primarily concerned with justice or equal protection. They are concerned with power. That is not legitimate.
Some analysts argue that higher turnout benefits only one party. Some people celebrate automatic registration and expanded mail voting and treat any effort to confirm citizenship or residency as an attack on democracy. Yet that is politics, not a neutral reading of civil rights statutes.
The government’s role includes facilitating eligible participation and excluding the ineligible. States and the federal government already share data for various purposes to prevent fraud. Tax collection and benefit payments rely on available citizenship and identity information to flag potential mismatches.
Using this information to cure the voter rolls, subject to safeguards, would be a similar and quite ordinary administrative function. Judges who treat it as a civil rights violation elevate one risk — the erroneous removal of a legitimate voter — above the other: dilution of legitimate votes. Both risks exist, but only one apparently matters.
The rules must be applied as written. Any judge who redefines civil rights law as a turnout maximization project has failed to protect the franchise. Those who measure success only by the size of the pile of ballots are measuring power.
The rest of us are measuring whether the election still belongs to the people entitled to decide it.
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