Judge Rules Justice Department Cannot Use State Voter Rolls for Citizenship Checks

A U.S. judge ruled Friday that the Justice Department's efforts to obtain state voter rolls and cross-reference them with a federal immigration database to identify and remove ineligible voters were unlawful. The decision by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan represents a significant setback for the Trump administration's attempts to assert greater federal control over election administration.

In her 78-page ruling, Sooknanan sided with the watchdog group Common Cause, which challenged the Justice Department's practice. The judge stated that the department had underestimated the potential for wrongfully disenfranchising eligible U.S. citizens. Evidence presented indicated that the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database, used for these checks, could contain inaccuracies, potentially flagging naturalized citizens as non-citizens.

“The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

Ming Cheung, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represented the plaintiffs, commented, “Today’s ruling makes clear that the administration cannot use the federal government to disrupt elections.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department indicated that the department is reviewing the decision.

This ruling follows a prior decision by Sooknanan in June that blocked the Trump administration from using an expanded version of the SAVE database for voter roll accuracy checks. The U.S. Supreme Court later issued a temporary pause on that previous order. Federal law prohibits the systematic review of voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which could limit the impact of both Sooknanan's recent decision and the Supreme Court's pause on her earlier order for the upcoming midterms.

President Donald Trump, who has promoted claims of widespread voter fraud, had directed the Justice Department last year to focus on preventing ineligible individuals from voting. This directive led the department to request voter rolls from nearly all 50 states, including sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth. Eighteen states, predominantly led by Republicans, complied with these requests.

Upon receiving the voter data, the Justice Department used the SAVE system to identify non-citizens and then notified states to remove them from their rolls. Sooknanan noted that the expansion of SAVE under the current administration included citizenship data from the Social Security Administration, which may not be up-to-date, potentially leading to the flagging of naturalized citizens.

The Justice Department initiated lawsuits against 30 states, both Democratic and Republican-led, along with Washington D.C., that refused to provide their unredacted voter rolls. The department has reportedly lost 26 of these cases without achieving a victory.