By Luc Cohen
Nov 2 (Reuters) – A US judge on Monday temporarily barred the Trump administration from moving ahead with a plan it says would prevent noncitizen voting, but that critics say risks disenfranchising eligible voters and infringing on states’ authority over elections.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan barred the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from sending states lists of registered voters the administration says may not be citizens, and from asking state election officials to separate out those voters’ ballots or not count them until citizenship is proven.
The ruling marks the latest in a series of legal setbacks for President Donald Trump’s efforts to assert federal control over election administration ahead of the November 3 midterms. Trump’s fellow Republicans are battling to retain majorities in both houses of Congress.
However, the Trump administration notched a victory on Monday in a separate case where a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the government to threaten state and local election officials with prosecution if they did not comply with demands related to voting by alleged noncitizens. Chutkan is not bound by that ruling.
Noncitizen voting is illegal and all available evidence shows that it is exceedingly rare. But Trump, who falsely asserts that his loss in the 2020 presidential election was due to fraud, has long accused states — which are responsible for administering elections — of facilitating noncitizen voting.
Over the past month, the Trump administration ramped up a pressure campaign against election officials over alleged noncitizen voting by sending letters to officials in California and Washington state demanding they not count any ballots from people on lists of voters the administration said may not be citizens.
In response, voting rights and privacy advocates asked Chutkan to temporarily prevent the Trump administration from sending such lists to states and making such demands. The plaintiffs alleged the administration was violating the Privacy Act of 1974, which restricts the federal government’s ability to disclose sensitive private information.
The Justice Department said in a court filing on Saturday that its letters to California and Washington were part of an effort to enforce a federal law banning noncitizen voting and did not amount to a distinct policy subject to review by a federal court.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in Los Angeles rejected the Justice Department’s request to order California to temporarily set aside mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it said were likely not citizens.
Chutkan, a Washington, DC-based appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, said the administration’s data may not be reliable, meaning there was a risk that lawfully registered voters would be disenfranchised. An appeals court rejected on Friday the department’s request for an emergency order pending appeal.
Also on Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the Trump administration’s demands over alleged noncitizen voting.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Edmund Klamann ad Stephen Coates)
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