The Justice Department’s campaign to get ahold of state voter registration lists, run them through federal databases to identify noncitizens, then prod the states to boot those people from their rolls is illegal, a federal judge ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, said the Trump Justice Department had turned civil rights laws on their head by using them to strike names from lists, rather than get more people to vote.
She said that has turned every registered voter into a potential fraud investigation target — even though the databases the government is using to spot noncitizens are flawed and have actually led to valid citizens being removed from voting lists.
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“Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” she wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”
She was particularly harsh on DOJ’s civil rights division, which is leading the effort and is run by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
Judge Sooknanan said that division was “forged in the Civil Rights Movement” and voting was a major focus. But under the Trump administration, it was being used to delete voters.
“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” she said.
DOJ said it was reviewing the ruling.
Voting rights activists hailed the decision as a win for voters.
“It’s time the Trump administration stop these desperate attempts to seize voters’ private data and take control of our elections,” said Virginia Kase Solomon, president of Common Cause, the lead plaintiff in the case.
The ruling is another in a series of legal losses for DOJ on state voter lists.
The department filed more than 30 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia seeking to force release of their lists. More than 20 of those cases have reached judicial rulings and DOJ has lost every one of them.
But Judge Sooknanan went further, saying the way DOJ wanted to collect and use the information violated federal privacy laws.
At the root of the effort is Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. That’s what the names are being checked against.
Judge Sooknanan, though, said the system is error-prone, regularly misidentifying citizens as noncitizens.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Anthony Nel, wasn’t a citizen when he was issued his Social Security number but later naturalized. He said the SAVE system continued to list him as a noncitizen despite that.
The Trump administration said some mistakes may be made, but it has argued that the broader threat of noncitizens voting is too large to ignore.
The Justice Department and DHS have been announcing new cases of noncitizen voting at a rate of more than one a day since the start of September.
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