Justice Department ran ‘roughshod’ over civil rights with plans to audit state voter rolls, judge says

By Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — A federal judge accused the Justice Department of trying to subvert civil rights laws with a voter roll audit plan that would run “roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.”

The new ruling from US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan halts the department’s sweeping project to obtain non-public data and audit nearly every state’s voter rolls, a major legal setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to insert the federal government into election administration.

Her 78-page opinion is a stinging rebuke of how the administration has shifted the priorities of the Justice Department, specifically its Civil Rights Division.

She described the division, which has been dramatically transformed during Trump’s second term, as historically standing at “the forefront of the federal government’s efforts to protect Americans’ right to vote.”

When Trump returned to the White House last year, the DOJ abandoned several high-profile voting rights cases as political appointees pushed out career staff from the division. For the last year, much of the public work of the voting section has been focused on obtaining state voter rolls in a hunt for non-citizen voters—which has long been a fixation of Trump’s mass election fraud beliefs.

“Generations of Civil Rights Division attorneys and staff have worked to protect that right – a sacred right that gives our citizenry a say in its government and secures all other individual rights against government interference,” wrote Sooknanan, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden.

“Against that backdrop, this case is anomalous,” Sooknanan added.

She concluded that the Trump administration violated federal laws in how it demanded that states produce non-public voter data, for the purposes of finding alleged non-citizens on the rolls and then instructing states to remove them.

The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

Sooknanan’s order blocks the Justice Department’s voter list review program head-on, after several states have had success in fending off lawsuits from the administration that sought their sensitive voter data.

While most states resisted turning over their unredacted rolls, at least 18 states have produced the registration records to the Justice Department, according to filings in the case. It is unclear what the administration has done with the data since obtaining it.

Sooknanan’s ruling leans on language the DOJ inserted into agreements it offered states to encourage them to produce their rolls. The agreements said that after the department completed its audit, states would then be required to “clean” their rolls within 45 days.

The judge concluded Friday that Congress did not give the administration the power to direct state voter roll purges. The Justice Department had pointed to two federal laws that govern certain aspects of voter registration, as well as to the 1960 Civil Rights Act, to justify its data-collection.

“They are wrong,” Sooknanan wrote Friday. “In fact, it would turn these voter-protection laws on their head to find that they authorize DOJ’s unprecedented actions.”

Her ruling noted that she was joining 25 other district judges who have ruled in lawsuits DOJ brought against recalcitrant states in finding that the Civil Rights Act did not empower the agency the voter records it was seeking.

The law gave the attorney general certain investigatory powers to respond to Jim Crow-era voter restrictions, and Sooknanan said that the DOJ’s arguments about the law would “subvert” its text.

She wrote that “the Defendants make other startling arguments.”

“They suggest that every American citizen who registers to vote is the subject of a voter fraud investigation underway in the Civil Rights Division simply because they registered to vote,” she said.

For the review, the administration planned on comparing the voter rolls with a citizenship records data system known as SAVE – or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – well as with other federal databases, in a hunt for ineligible voters.

However, the plaintiffs in the case – the voter advocacy group Common Cause, as well as some individual voters – noted that SAVE has a reputation for producing false positives. They argued that the collection and review of the data was chilling political participation – particularly for naturalized citizens, who were more likely to be wrongfully investigated because of the flawed data matches – and that it would lead to mistaken removals of eligible voters from the rolls. The voters also alleged their privacy rights were violated by the disclosure of the data.

Sooknanan, in a separate case, had concluded the administration had violated federal privacy protections in how it revamped the SAVE data program to be used more aggressively in voter purges. However, the Supreme Court recently reversed that ruling, reviving that program for states to use voluntarily to verify voters’ citizenship status.

The Justice Department did not respond to CNN’s inquiry about the new ruling.

Common Cause President and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement that it was “victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.”

“It’s time the Trump administration stop these desperate attempts to seize voters’ private data and take control of our elections,” she said.

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