Donald Trump’s effort to expand federal scrutiny of voter rolls has suffered another major setback in court, just weeks before the midterm elections.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled Friday that the Justice Department acted unlawfully when it sought state voter rolls to cross-check against a federal immigration database in an effort to identify voters it believed were ineligible.
The 78-page ruling sided with voting-rights watchdog Common Cause and warned that the administration’s approach risked wrongly flagging eligible American citizens. The database used in the process can contain outdated citizenship information, including records that fail to reflect when someone has become a naturalized citizen, according to the court’s findings.
The decision is the latest blow to the administration’s effort to obtain sensitive voter information from states and use federal databases to scrutinize voter eligibility.
The problem with the administration’s database
The Justice Department demanded that nearly all 50 states provide complete, unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive personal information such as dates of birth and Social Security numbers.
Eighteen mostly Republican-led states complied. The department then compared the information against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, and alerted states to voters identified as potential noncitizens.
But Sooknanan found that the system’s limitations created a serious risk of eligible citizens being incorrectly identified.
A person who became a U.S. citizen after an underlying record was created, for example, could still be flagged by outdated information.
That matters because an inaccurate database match is not proof that someone is ineligible to vote. Any effort to remove voters based on such information risks depriving eligible citizens of their voting rights.
A growing string of legal setbacks
The Justice Department has also sued states that refused to hand over their unredacted voter rolls. According to Reuters, the department has lost 26 of 30 related cases so far without winning any of them.
The administration has argued that its efforts are aimed at preventing ineligible people from voting. Trump has repeatedly claimed that widespread fraud undermined his 2020 election defeat, despite state audits and independent studies finding that such fraud is rare.
The latest ruling does not settle every legal dispute over federal access to voter information. Nor does it mean states cannot maintain accurate voter rolls or investigate credible evidence of ineligible registration.
It does, however, deliver another significant setback to the administration’s particular effort to use federal data to pressure states into identifying and potentially removing voters.
A separate legal fight over the expanded use of SAVE remains complicated by Supreme Court action that temporarily paused an earlier ruling by Sooknanan.
There is also a federal election-law restriction on systematic voter-roll reviews during the 90 days before a federal election, a limitation that could affect the practical consequences of the court battles ahead of November.
The broader fight concerns more than access to a government database. It raises fundamental questions about how far the federal government can go in overseeing elections that the Constitution largely leaves to the states—and how much confidence officials should place in databases that can contain outdated information.
