US judge blocks Trump push for state voter rolls
Reuters counts 21 straight courtroom losses for Justice Department, election control fight shifts to funding threats and appeals
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The Justice Department's 21 losses since January have come from federal judges across the country appointed by presidents of both parties (AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
A judge has again blocked the Trump administration’s push to force states to hand over voter records, extending what Reuters described as a run of courtroom defeats for the Justice Department’s effort to obtain state voter rolls ahead of the November midterms.
According to Reuters, the administration has now lost 21 straight court battles on the issue since January, with federal judges — including appointees of both parties — repeatedly pointing to the US constitution’s allocation of election administration to the states. The latest ruling dismissed a Justice Department bid to obtain unredacted voter rolls from Washington, DC, which include sensitive identifiers such as birthdates and partial Social Security numbers.
The legal losses have not slowed the political campaign. The administration argues that noncitizen voting is widespread and benefits Democrats, while state audits and independent studies have found such cases to be rare. Reuters cited its own review finding 129 prosecutions for noncitizen voting since 1996, with most cases tied to confusion or miscommunication rather than coordinated fraud.
What is being built is less a single lawsuit than a compliance system: lawsuits against more than two dozen states, warning letters to election officials in all 50 states, and threats to tie unrelated federal money to data-sharing. Reuters reported that the Justice Department’s civil rights division warned in early July that election officials could face criminal charges if they knowingly left noncitizens on voter rolls. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security said it would withhold some disaster relief funds from states that do not run their voter rolls through a federal immigration database.
The administration has also tried to narrow who can receive mail ballots via an executive order that would limit ballots to voters on federal eligibility lists compiled by DHS — an order that a federal judge has blocked, Reuters reported. The Justice Department has appealed 16 of its losses, and is seeking broader review in at least one case at the Cincinnati-based 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals after a panel upheld dismissal of a lawsuit against Michigan.
Even if the courts keep saying no, the process itself imposes costs. States must staff up for litigation, respond to federal demands for personal data, and weigh whether disaster funding and other federal levers will be used as bargaining chips.
For now, the administration has not won a single federal court case compelling states to turn over voter-roll data. The next step, Reuters reports, could be an attempt to bring the fight to a Supreme Court with a conservative majority.