Trump pressed states for info on millions of voters in the midterms. It’s mostly failed.

A federal judge ruled illegal the Trump administration's project of collecting voter data from states and passing it to Homeland Security Investigations, a sub-agency of ICE, weeks before the midterms. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan found the Justice Department's approach effectively treated every registered voter as a subject of a fraud investigation, writing that deciding who gets to vote belongs to the states, not the federal government. Internal HSI documents show the agency received nearly 51 million Justice Department records tied to its election integrity investigations.

Sixteen states, including Texas, Florida, and Ohio, had voluntarily handed over voter rolls even as the DOJ lost at least 23 separate lawsuits trying to compel other states to do the same. The Supreme Court separately let states use a Homeland Security screening tool called SAVE to hunt for noncitizen voters, though its effect has been limited by laws barring mass purges close to an election; critics say SAVE has repeatedly misflagged actual citizens. The DOJ has since filed a string of noncitizen voting cases, including charges against 16 people this month, even though research consistently shows such voting is rare.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called enforcing citizenship requirements for voting a non-partisan concept. A DOJ spokesperson said only that the department was reviewing the ruling.

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