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US judge curbs DHS hunt for noncitizen voters in nine states before midterms
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found the operation likely intimidates citizens and relies on flawed data. Attorney General Todd Blanche said only eligible people should vote. The order is paused until Friday for an appeal.
Key points
- The order covers nine states, including California, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
- DHS built target lists from voter records covering 48.2 million voters.
- The ruling takes effect at 5 pm on Friday unless the administration wins a stay.
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop field operations aimed at people it has reason to believe are US citizens in its drive to find noncitizen voters in nine states, less than two weeks before the midterm elections.
US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in arguing that the initiative breaks the Voting Rights Act’s ban on intimidating people who help or mobilise voters. Her order covers California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
Under the order, DHS may not rely only on records from its voter-matching programme to target people it knows, suspects or should reasonably suspect are citizens. It is on hold until 5 pm on Friday to give the administration time to appeal.
The department built its target lists from tens of millions of voter records, including 48.2 million voters on lists the judge described as being of “questionable provenance”. Staff were told to complete at least 40 reviews and had no more than 12 minutes per person to clear someone using commercial databases.
The judge wrote that the department’s data was “widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens”, leaving citizens afraid “that their name will be wrongly included in the hundreds of thousands identified for investigation”. That fear, she said, was “objectively reasonable”.
The case was brought by National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, the Voto Latino Foundation, Santa Clara County and the City and County of San Francisco. Their lawyer, Beau Tremitiere of Protect Democracy, said voting is a right citizens “should be able to exercise without armed government agents harassing them”.
A DHS spokesperson said the department did not plan to investigate voters it believed to be citizens and was “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens”. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters on Thursday that the aim was to “guarantee to the American people that the only people that are voting are people that are eligible to vote”. Officials had not said whether they would appeal.