US judge rules Trump administration’s use of voter data unlawful

What the report says

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ruled that the U.S. Justice Department unlawfully sought state voter rolls to compare them with a federal immigration database in an effort to identify people it believed might be ineligible to vote. According to Al Jazeera’s report, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the decision on Friday in a 78-page ruling that sided with the watchdog group Common Cause.

The ruling is another setback for President Donald Trump’s push to expand federal oversight of elections ahead of the midterm elections. The court said the administration had downplayed the danger of wrongly removing eligible citizens from voter rolls because of inaccuracies in the SAVE database, which is used to verify immigration status. Sooknanan wrote that the government was trying to determine who gets to vote, while Congress had left that authority to the states.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling. An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union said the decision showed the administration could not use federal power to interfere with elections or endanger voting rights. Al Jazeera also reported that Trump had directed the department to crack down on voting by noncitizens, that the department requested unredacted voter rolls from nearly all 50 states, and that 18 states complied.

The practical effect before the November 3 election may be limited, since federal law bars systematic voter-roll purges within 90 days of a federal election. The ruling follows an earlier decision by Sooknanan blocking expanded use of the SAVE database for voter-roll checks.