A federal judge on Friday blocked the Justice Department’s policy of gathering voter registration lists from states, running names through a federal database and telling states to remove suspected noncitizens.
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U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan in Washington found that the arrangement violated federal privacy and procedural laws and went beyond the Justice Department’s authority.
The Justice Department last year took the unusual step of asking states to turn over voter lists, which include names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
Most states resisted and have fought off lawsuits seeking to hand over their rolls. But 18 states agreed to turn over their full lists and entered agreements saying they would remove voters who the federal government determined could be noncitizens.
Voters and voting rights groups sued, noting that federal databases include inaccuracies that have misidentified citizens as noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections. Friday’s decision cited a 2006 internal audit of Social Security data that found over 3 million people who had obtained U.S. citizenship were inaccurately listed as noncitizens.
Sooknanan ruled in favor of Common Cause and other voting rights groups on Friday, finding that the Justice Department’s program violates the Privacy Act and other laws.
“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” wrote Sooknanan, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden.
The ruling is a setback for President Donald Trump amid a multifront fight over voter rolls and the use of federal data, which is sometimes inaccurate. Trump has claimed for years that noncitizen voting is rampant, even though independent reviews have found it rarely happens.
Last month, the administration won a ruling from the Supreme Court that said it could check voter rolls using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements data system. The ruling meant that states could access the database if they wanted.
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That case centered on a different law, and Sooknanan determined the Supreme Court ruling had no bearing on the one she decided Friday. With her decision, she said, she was blocking the Justice Department’s underlying policy of gathering voter rolls and sharing data with other agencies.
Most immediately, the ruling could affect the 18 Republican-led states that have been working with the Justice Department, according to court records.
“Today’s decision does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls. Neither does it prevent states from maintaining their own voter rolls,” Sooknanan wrote. “And to state the obvious, the Court’s decision does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections.”
The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the ruling or say whether it planned to appeal.
Among those who sued was Anthony Nel, who was born in South Africa and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager. He was misidentified as a noncitizen and removed from the rolls in Texas. He was later reinstated.
“No other voter should have to go through what I did, and this ruling protects every eligible voter from having their registration mistakenly revoked for no reason,” Nel said in a statement.
Other states have declined to turn over their full voter rolls, and the Justice Department has sued 30 of them and Washington. So far, the department has lost all 26 of the cases that have been decided.
The disputes over the voter rolls are significant but may have little effect on next month’s midterm elections because a separate federal law bars removing large numbers of voters from the rolls in the 90 days before Election Day. But the litigation will determine what rules are in place for voter registration heading into the 2028 presidential election.
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