Justice Department ran ‘roughshod’ over civil rights with plans to audit state voter rolls, judge says

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A federal judge accused the Justice Department of trying to subvert civil rights laws with a voter roll audit plan that would run “roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.”

The new ruling from US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan halts the department’s sweeping project to obtain non-public data and audit nearly every state’s voter rolls, a major legal setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to insert the federal government into election administration.

Her 78-page opinion is a stinging rebuke of how the administration has shifted the priorities of the Justice Department, specifically its Civil Rights Division.

She described the division, which has been dramatically transformed during Trump’s second term, as historically standing at “the forefront of the federal government’s efforts to protect Americans’ right to vote.”

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When Trump returned to the White House last year, the DOJ abandoned several high-profile voting rights cases as political appointees pushed out career staff from the division. For the last year, much of the public work of the voting section has been focused on obtaining state voter rolls in a hunt for non-citizen voters—which has long been a fixation of Trump’s mass election fraud beliefs.

“Generations of Civil Rights Division attorneys and staff have worked to protect that right – a sacred right that gives our citizenry a say in its government and secures all other individual rights against government interference,” wrote Sooknanan, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden.

“Against that backdrop, this case is anomalous,” Sooknanan added.

She concluded that the Trump administration violated federal laws in how it demanded that states produce non-public voter data, for the purposes of finding alleged non-citizens on the rolls and then instructing states to remove them.

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.”

Sooknanan’s order blocks the Justice Department’s voter list review program head-on, after several states have had success in fending off lawsuits from the administration that sought their sensitive voter data.

While most states resisted turning over their unredacted rolls, at least 18 states have produced the registration records to the Justice Department, according to filings in the case. It is unclear what the administration has done with the data since obtaining it.

Sooknanan’s ruling leans on language the DOJ inserted into agreements it offered states to encourage them to produce their rolls. The agreements said that after the department completed its audit, states would then be required to “clean” their rolls within 45 days.

The judge concluded Friday that Congress did not give the administration the power to direct state voter roll purges. The Justice Department had pointed to two federal laws that govern certain aspects of voter registration, as well as to the 1960 Civil Rights Act, to justify its data-collection.

“They are wrong,” Sooknanan wrote Friday. “In fact, it would turn these voter-protection laws on their head to find that they authorize DOJ’s unprecedented actions.”

Her ruling noted that she was joining 25 other district judges who have ruled in lawsuits DOJ brought against recalcitrant states in finding that the Civil Rights Act did not empower the agency the voter records it was seeking.

The law gave the attorney general certain investigatory powers to respond to Jim Crow-era voter restrictions, and Sooknanan said that the DOJ’s arguments about the law would “subvert” its text.

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She wrote that “the Defendants make other startling arguments.”

“They suggest that every American citizen who registers to vote is the subject of a voter fraud investigation underway in the Civil Rights Division simply because they registered to vote,” she said.

For the review, the administration planned on comparing the voter rolls with a citizenship records data system known as SAVE – or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – well as with other federal databases, in a hunt for ineligible voters.

However, the plaintiffs in the case – the voter advocacy group Common Cause, as well as some individual voters – noted that SAVE has a reputation for producing false positives. They argued that the collection and review of the data was chilling political participation – particularly for naturalized citizens, who were more likely to be wrongfully investigated because of the flawed data matches – and that it would lead to mistaken removals of eligible voters from the rolls. The voters also alleged their privacy rights were violated by the disclosure of the data.

Sooknanan, in a separate case, had concluded the administration had violated federal privacy protections in how it revamped the SAVE data program to be used more aggressively in voter purges. However, the Supreme Court recently reversed that ruling, reviving that program for states to use voluntarily to verify voters’ citizenship status.

The Justice Department did not respond to CNN’s inquiry about the new ruling.

Common Cause President and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement that it was “victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.”

“It’s time the Trump administration stop these desperate attempts to seize voters’ private data and take control of our elections,” she said.

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一名联邦法官指责司法部试图通过一项选民名册审计计划来颠覆民权法，该计划将“粗暴地践踏那些精心制定的、旨在保护美国人民权利的长期法律”。

美国地区法官斯帕克尔·苏克纳南的新裁决叫停了该部门获取非公开数据并审计几乎每个州选民名册的大规模项目，这对唐纳德·特朗普总统将联邦政府纳入选举管理的努力是一个重大的法律挫败。

她这份长达 78 页的意见书严厉批评了本届政府如何改变了司法部，特别是其民权司的优先事项。

她将这个部门描述为“在特朗普第二个任期内发生了巨大变化”，并称其历史上一直处于“联邦政府保护美国人投票权的最前沿”。

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记录显示，美国移民及海关执法局（ICE）审查了数千万份选民记录，以寻找非公民选民。

去年特朗普重返白宫后，司法部放弃了几起备受瞩目的投票权案件，因为政治任命官员将职业工作人员从该部门排挤出去。过去一年，投票权部门的大部分公共工作都集中在获取各州选民名册，以搜寻非公民选民——这长期以来一直是特朗普“大规模选举舞弊”论调的核心。

“几代民权司的律师和工作人员一直致力于保护这项权利——一项神圣的权利，它赋予公民在政府中拥有发言权，并保障所有其他个人权利免受政府干预，”苏克纳南写道。苏克纳南是由乔·拜登总统任命的法官。

“在这种背景下，这起案件显得很反常，”苏克纳南补充道。

她总结说，特朗普政府要求各州提供非公开的选民数据，目的是找出选民名册上的所谓非公民，然后指示各州将他们删除，这种做法违反了联邦法律。

苏克纳南写道：“这项受质疑的政策代表了联邦政府试图决定谁有投票权。但国会始终将这项权力保留在宪法赋予的地方：各州。”

苏克纳南的命令直接阻止了司法部的选民名单审查计划。此前，一些州成功击退了政府提起的、旨在获取其敏感选民数据的诉讼。

虽然大多数州拒绝交出未经删减的选民名册，但根据案件文件显示，至少有18个州已向司法部提供了登记记录。目前尚不清楚政府在获得这些数据后采取了哪些措施。

苏克纳南的裁决依据的是司法部在其向各州提供的协议中加入的措辞，该协议旨在鼓励各州提交人口普查记录。协议规定，在司法部完成审计后，各州必须在45天内“清理”其人口普查记录。

法官周五裁定，国会并未授权政府指示各州清理选民名册。司法部曾援引两项规范选民登记某些方面的联邦法律以及1960年《民权法案》来为其数据收集行为辩护。

苏克纳南周五写道：“他们错了。事实上，如果发现这些选民保护法授权司法部采取史无前例的行动，那就完全颠覆了这些法律的意义。”

她的裁决指出，她与另外 25 位地区法官一样，在司法部对不配合的州提起的诉讼中裁定，《民权法案》没有赋予该机构获取其所寻求的选民记录的权力。

该法律赋予司法部长一定的调查权力，以应对吉姆·克劳时代的选民限制，苏克纳南表示，司法部关于该法律的论点将“颠覆”其文本。

Thomas Werner/Bloomberg/Getty Images/文件

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她写道：“被告提出了其他令人震惊的论点。”

她说：“他们暗示，每个登记投票的美国公民都会成为民权部门正在进行的选民欺诈调查的对象，仅仅因为他们登记了投票。”

为了进行审查，政府计划将选民名册与名为 SAVE（即“系统性外国人权利核查”）的公民身份记录数据系统以及其他联邦数据库进行比较，以查找不合格的选民。

然而，本案原告——选民权益倡导组织“共同事业”（Common Cause）以及一些个人选民——指出，​​SAVE系统素来以产生错误结果而臭名昭著。他们认为，收集和审查这些数据会阻碍政治参与，尤其是对已入籍公民而言，他们更容易因为数据匹配错误而受到不公正的调查，而且这会导致符合资格的选民被错误地从选民名册中移除。这些选民还声称，数据的披露侵犯了他们的隐私权。

在另一起案件中，苏克纳南法官认定，政府在修改“选民信息安全计划”（SAVE）数据项目以更积极地用于选民清洗时，违反了联邦隐私保护法。然而，最高法院最近推翻了这一裁决，恢复了该计划，允许各州自愿使用该计划来核实选民的公民身份。

司法部没有回应 CNN 关于这项新裁决的询问。

“共同事业”总裁兼首席执行官弗吉尼亚·凯斯·索洛蒙在一份声明中表示，这是“选民的胜利，也是司法部的又一次失败”。

“特朗普政府是时候停止这些不顾一切地企图窃取选民私人数据并控制我们选举的行为了，”她说。