Washington, DC: Judge Chutkan Bars Trump Administration From Sending Noncitizen Voter Lists to States

A federal judge in Washington, DC, ruled late on Monday that the Trump administration cannot send states lists of registered voters it says may not be citizens, hours before polls opened for the November 3 midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan temporarily barred the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from sending the lists to state officials. The order also bars the departments from asking officials to separate the ballots of people on the lists, or to hold those ballots uncounted until citizenship is proven.

A fight over lists and the Privacy Act

Over the past month, the administration sent letters to election officials in California and Washington state demanding that they not count ballots from people named on the federal lists. Voting rights and privacy advocates sued in Washington and asked Chutkan to stop the practice. They argued that sending the lists breaks the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits how the federal government can share sensitive personal information.

The Justice Department answered in a court filing on Saturday, October 31. It said the letters to California and Washington were part of enforcing the federal law that bans noncitizen voting, and that the letters did not amount to a distinct policy a court can review.

Chutkan, who sits in Washington and was appointed by former President Barack Obama, said the administration data may not be reliable. On that record, she found a risk that voters who are lawfully registered could lose their votes.

One ruling in a week of them

The Washington ruling is one of several court decisions on the same fight in the last week. A federal judge in Los Angeles rejected the Justice Department request to order California to set aside mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters the government said were likely not citizens. On Friday, October 30, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with its demands.

On Monday, the administration won ground in a separate case. A panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the government to threaten election officials with prosecution over alleged noncitizen voting. Reuters reported that Chutkan is not bound by that ruling.

Noncitizen voting is illegal, and the available evidence shows it is exceedingly rare. States run elections in the United States, and President Donald Trump has long accused states of allowing noncitizen voting. He has falsely said fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Republicans are fighting to keep their majorities in the House and the Senate in the November 3 vote, and the Chutkan order stays in place while voters cast ballots on Tuesday.