President Trump’s push to clean up states’ voter rolls suffered setbacks last week when two federal judges shut down a demand for information about registered voters in California and Oregon.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, overseeing the California case, said the Justice Department was flipping the law on its head.
The Justice Department is relying on a powerful 1960 civil rights law and two more recent statutes that it says compel states to turn over voter registration information when the attorney general asks for it. The department requested voters’ names, addresses, birth dates and identifying numbers — driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers — from the states.
Most states have resisted turning over all of that, saying the department can get what’s already public but to turn over any more would intrude on voters’ privacy and violate their state laws.
Judge Carter, a Clinton appointee to a federal court in California, agreed, delivering a vicious reproach to the administration.
He said the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was enacted to give the Justice Department the power to gather data to puncture states’ Jim Crow laws that suppressed Black voters. To use it to amass a database to force states to clean up their voter rolls is a perversion of the law, he said.
“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data. This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation,” Judge Carter opined.
The California ruling was joined by another judge in Oregon, Mustafa T. Kasubhai, a Biden appointee who indicated in a hearing Thursday he will also block the DOJ request.
He called the idea that the federal government was compiling a database of names it wanted to remove from voter rolls a “dark theory,” according to a report by Courthouse News Service.
J. Christian Adams, a voting rights expert and head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said judges are getting it wrong. He said the law gives Attorney General Pam Bondi the power to do what she’s trying to do.
“This isn’t a close call,” he said. “Back during Jim Crow states tried to hide the registration data from the Justice Department. Here we go again.”
The administration is faring better in Connecticut, where U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, a Trump appointee, has ordered the state to “show cause” why it has defied the attorney general’s request.
The Justice Department has requested records from nearly every state and sued 23 states and the District of Columbia under the 1960 law.
Virginia became the latest to face a lawsuit on Friday, just ahead of that state’s change in governor from Republican to Democrat.
Of the cases, 13 have been assigned to Democrat-appointed district judges, seven have been assigned to GOP nominees and three are being handled by magistrate judges. Virginia’s case did not have a judge assigned as of Friday evening.
Judge Carter, in his ruling Thursday, repeatedly characterized the request for information as a major invasion of privacy and said it could scare “political minority groups” or “working-class immigrants” from registering or voting.
“There cannot be unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate,” he said. “This is antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections our country promises and the franchise that civil rights leaders fought and died for.”
President Trump has made expansive claims about election irregularities. In 2016, he suggested Hillary Clinton would not have achieved her margin over him in the popular vote without widespread voting by invalid voters.
He made similar claims after his 2020 election loss.
Last March he issued an executive order pushing federal agencies to pursue stricter voting controls.
That included ordering the Election Assistance Commission to require proof of citizenship in the voter registration form it provides.
It also included an order to Homeland Security to obtain and review each state’s voter records to try to spot problems.
The Justice Department lawsuits against the states cite Mr. Trump’s order as partial justification for their requests, and Judge Carter cited the order in his ruling, too.
Facing worries over data privacy, Trump officials have sought to reach agreements with states vowing to prevent disclosure.
Judge Carter wasn’t swayed.
“The DOJ seeks to surpass the scope of the [National Voter Registration Act] and wield it to collect information beyond the scope and purpose of what Congress envisioned. However, the NVRA ultimately does not allow for the unjustified, wholesale disclosure of voters’ sensitive information,” he ruled.
