Trump’s voter-data collection scheme is an illegal nationwide ‘dragnet,’ judge rules

A federal judge ruled the Trump administration's project to funnel voter data to Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE sub-agency, is illegal, finding the transfers violated the Privacy Act. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote the Justice Department's legal theory effectively treated every registered voter as a fraud suspect, and that the Constitution leaves election authority with the states, not Washington.

The ruling caps a string of losses for the DOJ, which has lost at least 23 district court suits seeking state voter data, while the Supreme Court separately blocked a plan to use the Postal Service to restrict mail voting. Internal documents show Homeland Security Investigations received nearly 51 million Justice Department records, and at least 16 states, including Texas, Florida and Ohio, voluntarily handed over their voter rolls despite the litigation.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has defended the effort as enforcing a simple rule that only citizens may vote, even as studies and the DOJ's own patchy results, 16 noncitizen fraud charges out of millions of records, suggest the practice is rare. Sooknanan noted the government sought to investigate every voter without any particularized suspicion, and a DOJ spokesperson said only that the ruling was under review.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.