By Luc Cohen
June 24 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday upheld a court order blocking the Justice Department from obtaining Michigan’s voter rolls, dealing a blow to the Trump administration’s push to boost the federal government’s role in elections.
The decision from the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes as President Donald Trump’s Republicans are locked in a tight battle to maintain control of both houses of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections.
The U.S. Constitution assigns individual states the responsibility of administering federal elections, though the federal government has some oversight authority. Trump, who maintains his false claim that his 2020 election loss was due to fraud, has long asserted that states are not doing enough to prevent ineligible people from casting ballots. He has said Republicans should “nationalize” and “take over” voting.
STATES CITE VOTERS’ PRIVACY RIGHTS
Starting last year, the Justice Department sent letters to election officials in nearly all 50 states seeking access to their voter lists, including sensitive identifying information like partial social security numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth.
At least 17 Republican-led states voluntarily shared the data. Dozens more states, including several led by Republicans, have resisted, in many cases arguing that sharing the information would violate their citizens’ privacy rights.
The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to try to force them to turn over their rolls, arguing it needs the unredacted lists to determine whether the states are doing enough to remove ineligible voters from their rolls.
The Justice Department has so far lost each case that has been decided at the trial court level.
DOJ CITED CIVIL RIGHTS ACT
In the Michigan case, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou said the voter rolls were not among the documents that the federal government had the right to demand from states under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The law, passed to combat racial discrimination at a time when Southern states were destroying Black Americans’ voter registration records to cover up disenfranchisement, requires states to preserve such records.
In appealing the case, the Justice Department called Jarbou’s reading of the law “novel and incorrect.”
Lawyers for Michigan said Jarbou correctly distinguished between materials voters submit to the state, which they said the federal government may demand, and records like voter rolls created by the state itself, which they said were not covered by the Civil Rights Act.
Jarbou was appointed by Trump during his first term.
Voting rights activists have expressed concern that the Trump administration is seeking to compare states’ voter rolls with other sources of data to purge people it believes are not citizens. They say that risks disenfranchising some voters because those data sources may not have up-to-date information on whether previously ineligible immigrants have since become naturalized citizens.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Berkrot)
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