The Justice Department’s nationwide voter-list policy gave federal officials access to sensitive registration records and a role in identifying voters for removal. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan has now blocked the Trump administration from continuing it. Her ruling applies nationwide, including in states that voluntarily cooperated with the program.
Who Had the Power
The department requested unredacted voter registration lists from states across the country, including names, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. It shared records from participating states with the Department of Homeland Security, which checked citizenship status through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.
At least 18 states complied. They also agreed to remove voters identified as ineligible within 45 days of notification. That arrangement put state-held registration information into a federal process, while eligible voters faced the risk of being wrongly flagged and removed from voter rolls.
The program began last year after President Trump issued an executive order directing federal officials to work with states to identify potential election-law violations. The department’s effort reached beyond states that chose to participate: its policy sought records nationwide, and Sooknanan’s order blocks it across the country.
The Cost of a Mistake
Sooknanan found that the department hadn’t adequately considered the risk of mistakenly removing eligible voters, even though it knew federal citizenship records contained inaccuracies. Her ruling cited a 2006 Social Security Administration audit that found approximately 3.3 million U.S. citizens had been misidentified as noncitizens.
That figure sits at the center of the court’s warning. A database check could put citizens’ access to the voter rolls at risk. “The Court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more,” Sooknanan wrote.
The 78-page ruling invalidated the policy nationwide after multiple states had already won challenges to the Justice Department rule in their jurisdictions. Sooknanan concluded that the department exceeded its legal authority and violated federal privacy laws by requesting sensitive voter information and sharing it with other agencies to identify people’s citizenship status.
“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of American people,” Sooknanan wrote. The department’s policy collided with limits already in federal law—and with the privacy protections those laws provide.
A Court Challenge, Not a Community Program
Voting rights group Common Cause and four voters brought the April lawsuit. They accused the administration of trying to create a “sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus” ahead of November’s midterm elections. The plaintiffs argued that the department was trying to take control of voter registration procedures traditionally overseen by states, putting eligible Americans at risk of wrongful removal.
The challenge described in the ruling came through a lawsuit and state legal challenges; the article reports no mutual-aid effort or community-run alternative. The immediate check on the federal program came from the court’s decision, not from a change in how the department gathered records. The program’s machinery involved federal requests, agency data-sharing, citizenship checks and state agreements to remove people within 45 days. Sooknanan has blocked that policy nationwide.