DHS sued over voter records from 47 states
League of Women Voters and EPIC say files were merged with commercial datasets in breach of federal safeguards, thirty states had refused federal demands to hand them over
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Donald Trump and Markwayne Mullin
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Voters leave a polling location at Saugus Lynnhurst Elementary School in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on Election Day.
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California voting booth
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The Department of Homeland Security has been sued in federal court in Washington over its collection and analysis of voter files from at least 47 states, which the plaintiffs say violates federal law. The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens filed the complaint on Thursday, less than three weeks before Election Day.
The suit alleges that DHS obtained and processed the records even though officials in 30 states had previously refused federal demands to turn over voter information, and that the department's probe combines the files with commercial datasets while ignoring federal safeguards and the privacy rights of millions of Americans. The plaintiffs ask the court to declare the collection illegal, block the policy and order the department to delete the material it has already gathered.
The case is the latest legal challenge to Donald Trump's drive against noncitizen voting, which studies and prosecutions have found to be rare, and to a broader federal push into election administration — an area the Constitution and federal law leave primarily to the states. Federal courts have repeatedly rejected administration efforts to compel states to surrender voter information.
The filing came the same day the administration sued California election officials for moving too slowly on roughly 20,000 names the federal government flagged as likely noncitizens, asking a judge to bar their mail-in ballots from being counted unless eligibility is confirmed. The California secretary of state's office says it was given 48 hours to review the list and received neither the underlying evidence nor the methodology behind it; the Justice Department says US Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a multiagency and multilevel review to identify the names. Federal prosecutors have charged 50 individuals with voting crimes over the past month, according to acting deputy attorney general Trent McCotter, and the department is appealing a Florida federal judge's ruling that struck down the federal ban on noncitizen voting.
The administration continues to press states, alleging they are not doing enough to purge noncitizens from their rolls. The plaintiffs want the records destroyed; the administration is asking the states for more of them.