DOJ Lacks Authority To Check Voter Lists Against Immigration Database, Judge Says

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Justice (DOJ) cannot take the names of registered voters and compare them against a federal immigration database, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, based in Washington, handed down an order on Oct. 9 against the department.

The DOJ has been requesting lists of registered voters from states and, after obtaining them, checking them against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements service, which contains citizenship information.

When people are identified as registered to vote despite not being citizens – according to the SAVE database – the DOJ has been demanding that states remove them from voter rolls.

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

She also said that the department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.”

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

“The Trump administration has repeatedly taken extreme measures to interfere with how elections are run, undermine confidence in the results, and create confusion,” Ming Cheung, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing plaintiffs who sued over the policy, said in a statement.

“This effort to seize sensitive voter data is part of that same pattern, and today’s ruling makes clear that the administration cannot use the federal government to disrupt elections or put voters’ rights at risk.”

Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued in April, arguing the effort to build a national voter database with the files from states was illegal in part because the DOJ planned to disclose confidential voter data to contractors to help verify the status of the voters and force states to remove voters identified as lacking citizenship.

“No federal statute authorizes DOJ’s sprawling new voter surveillance, data consolidation, and purging operation,” they said.

Government lawyers said that Congress authorized the department to enforce voting laws, including the National Voter Registration Act, and that the effort was part of that enforcement.

The act says states must make a “reasonable effort” to remove ineligible voters from voter lists and says the attorney general can sue states if they do not comply with the law.

The DOJ created the policy after President Donald Trump directed the attorney general to work with states to identify suspected violations of election laws, including voting by ineligible individuals.

Sooknanan said that the laws the government cited do not authorize the policy.

“It would turn these voter-protection laws on their head to find that they authorize DOJ’s unprecedented actions,” she wrote.

The National Voter Registration Act, for instance, emphasizes the role states have in maintaining voter rolls and does not empower the DOJ to demand voter data from states, the judge said.

She vacated the DOJ’s effort to maintain voter lists.

The ruling came several weeks after the Supreme Court paused a ruling by Sooknanan in a related case that had blocked the government from using an expanded version of SAVE to verify voters’ citizenship.