A federal judge in California has ordered the Trump administration to halt investigations in nine states into whether noncitizens are registered to vote.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the U.S. District Court in Oakland ruled that the government’s efforts relied on data riddled with errors and led to intimidation of groups that provide voter assistance. She said this should be halted until polls close on Election Day, November 3.
She suspended her decision, issued Wednesday, until Friday to give the administration a chance to appeal.
The ruling applies to investigations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
This comes as the Trump administration has sought non-citizen voters across the country in the months leading up to the midterm elections. The administration has reported that this is a widespread problem, when in reality it is quite rare, as even its own surveys have shown.
The lawsuit was filed by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, as well as the Voto Latino Foundation, San Francisco County and Santa Clara County.
In response to the move, the Department of Homeland Security issued an emailed statement Thursday saying it was focused on “removing foreigners from voting and diluting the votes of U.S. citizens,” while adding, “We do not intend to question or investigate individuals we believe to be U.S. citizens.” »
According to court documents filed in the case, investigators were asked to target naturalized citizens to see if they had voted before becoming U.S. citizens. The voter lists to be verified came from sources including state and local governments and publicly available information. Martínez-Olguín called them “bulky and unreliable.”
“Even under the best conditions, there is a high probability of error in the review because there is no federal database containing the citizenship status of U.S. residents,” Martínez-Olguín wrote in his ruling. “The time limitations implemented during the Surge further exacerbate the risk of error.”
The Justice Department has demanded detailed, unredacted voter roll data from states and has sued all 30 states that have refused to release the information, losing each of those cases so far. The judge noted that for states that refused to share their records, the administration tried to obtain them through “unreliable commercial versions of voter rolls data.”
Martínez-Olguín said that during an “intensive” phase of the investigation that began in late August, agents were ordered to conduct reviews of flagged individuals taking no more than 12 minutes per person to assess whether they were legally qualified to vote.
In their challenge, the plaintiffs said some U.S. citizens believe they were misidentified and investigated as part of the investigation. Martínez-Olguín said these fears “are well understood as intimidation” that has dissuaded people from attending campaign events and working as poll observers during the election.
Beau Tremitière, a lawyer representing the unions and the voters group, said in a statement that the decision confirms the groups’ position.
“It was clear from the start that DHS constructed its lists based on flawed data, never checked the frequency of errors, and recklessly sent agents to people’s homes weeks before an election,” Tremitiere said.
Details of the investigation, known as the Unlawful Voter Initiative, were revealed last month after Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the New York Senate, and Alex Padilla, the Democratic senator from California, released a whistleblower report on it.
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