On October 31 (US time), US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the Justice Department's effort to obtain state voter rolls in order to cross-check them against federal immigration databases and identify voters deemed ineligible was unlawful.
The 78-page ruling came after the watchdog group Common Cause filed suit. Judge Sooknanan found that the administration had underestimated the risk of wrongly removing eligible citizens from voter rolls because of inaccurate information in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.
"The challenged policy represents an effort by the federal government to decide who gets to vote," Judge Sooknanan wrote, stressing that Congress had assigned that authority to the states.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling. Ming Cheung, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said the ruling showed the administration cannot use the federal apparatus to disrupt elections or put voters' rights at risk.
"The Trump administration has repeatedly applied extreme measures to interfere with how elections are run, undermining confidence in the results and sowing confusion," Cheung said in a statement.
President Donald Trump had earlier directed the Justice Department to tighten up voting by people who are ineligible, despite studies showing that voter fraud is rare. The department then asked nearly all 50 states to provide unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive personal information.
Eighteen states, mostly Republican-led, complied. The Justice Department cross-checked their data against SAVE and flagged those identified as non-citizens so they could be removed from voter rolls. Judge Sooknanan noted that the database may contain outdated citizenship records, leading to the mistaken identification of naturalized US citizens.
The Justice Department has also sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing to hand over voter data. Twenty-six of those cases have been dismissed.
In a separate case in June, Judge Sooknanan blocked the expanded use of the SAVE database to check voter rolls, an order the US Supreme Court temporarily paused last month. Federal law prohibits the systematic removal of voters from rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which could limit the ruling's practical effect before the November 3 vote.
