By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, Oct 9 (Reuters) – A US judge ruled on Friday that the Justice Department’s push to obtain state voter rolls and check them against a federal immigration database in order to demand that states remove voters it deemed ineligible was unlawful.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s decision marked the latest setback for President Donald Trump’s push to expand federal control over election administration ahead of the November 3 midterms, with his Republican Party battling to hold majorities in both houses of Congress.
In a 78-page decision siding with a challenge to the Justice Department’s practice brought by watchdog group Common Cause, Sooknanan wrote that the Justice Department had downplayed the risk that its practice would wrongfully disenfranchise eligible US citizens despite evidence that the immigration database, known as SAVE, could be inaccurate.
“The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states,” wrote Sooknanan, who is based in Washington and was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a separate case, Sooknanan in June blocked the Trump administration from using an expanded version of the SAVE database to check the accuracy of voter rolls. The US Supreme Court last month temporarily paused that decision.
Federal election law prohibits the systematic review of voter rolls in the 90 days before any federal election, potentially blunting the impact of both Sooknanan’s decision as well as the Supreme Court’s pause of her previous order on the upcoming midterms.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci )
