U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck down the Justice Department’s nationwide voter-list maintenance policy on Friday, ruling that the department exceeded its legal authority and violated federal privacy laws. The decision blocks the Trump administration from continuing its effort to collect voter registration records and identify suspected non-U.S. citizens, even in states that had voluntarily cooperated.
In a 78-page ruling, Sooknanan invalidated the policy nationwide. Multiple states had already won challenges to the Justice Department rule in their own jurisdictions. “DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of American people,” wrote Sooknanan, a Biden appointee.
How the Program Worked
The effort began one year ago, after President Trump issued an executive order directing federal officials to work with states to identify potential election-law violations. The Justice Department then requested unredacted voter registration lists from across the country. Those requests covered names, addresses and partial Social Security numbers.
At least 18 states complied. The department shared their records with the Department of Homeland Security and checked citizenship status against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Participating states also agreed to remove voters identified as ineligible within 45 days of notification.
That’s a short clock. It runs on federal data the judge found unreliable.
The Risk to Eligible Voters
Sooknanan found the department hadn’t adequately weighed the risk of mistakenly removing eligible voters, even though it knew federal citizenship records contained inaccuracies. She pointed to a 2006 Social Security Administration audit, now 20 years old, that found approximately 3.3 million U.S. citizens had been misidentified as noncitizens.
“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 policy didn’t just threaten wrongful removals. The court’s account says it had already caused them.
The Challenge
Voting rights group Common Cause and four voters brought the case in April. They accused the administration of trying to build a “sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus” ahead of November’s midterm elections. Their argument: the department was trying to take over voter registration procedures that states have traditionally overseen, putting eligible Americans at risk of being wrongly dropped from the rolls.
The ruling sided with that reading. It held that the department had gone beyond what the law allows, both by demanding sensitive voter information and by passing it to other agencies to determine people’s citizenship.
What Comes Next
The nationwide invalidation means the Justice Department can no longer continue the program, including in states that had agreed to participate. With midterm elections in November, the timing matters for voters whose registration status was caught up in the checks.
Why This Matters:
Voter rolls are the foundation of the franchise, and errors in them fall hardest on people with the fewest resources to fix them. The court’s finding rests on a documented problem: federal citizenship data has misidentified millions of citizens before, and the program gave states just 45 days to act on matches. For a voter flagged in error, that’s not much time to prove they belong on the rolls.
The ruling also draws a line on who controls elections. States have traditionally run voter registration, and Sooknanan held that federal privacy laws limit how far Washington can reach into that process. With November’s midterms approaching, the decision restores legal guardrails around personal data and the basic question of who gets to cast a ballot. Whether those guardrails hold on appeal is the next test.