Judge cited flawed voter data and 12-minute review limits
A U.S. district judge in Oakland ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to halt investigations into whether noncitizens are registered to vote in nine states. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found that the effort relied on data full of errors and was leading to intimidation of groups that perform voter assistance. She directed the pause until polls close on 3 November.
Homeland Security Investigations taskforce officers escort a suspect accused of illegally registering to vote in Commerce, California, on Monday. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP.
The ruling covers California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. Martínez-Olguín made the ruling Wednesday but held it until Friday to give the administration a chance to appeal.
Martínez-Olguín’s reasoning focused on how the voter lists were built and whom investigators were told to examine. The lists of voters to check came from sources that included state and local governments and publicly available information. Legal filings in the case said investigators were directed to target naturalized citizens and determine whether they had voted before becoming U.S. citizens.
Martínez-Olguín called the lists “voluminous and unreliable.” “Even under the best conditions, there is a high likelihood of error in review because there is no federal database containing citizenship status of U.S. residents,” she wrote. “The time limitations implemented during the Surge further exacerbate the risk of error.”
The investigation entered a “surge” phase in late August. Agents were ordered to complete each review of a flagged person in no more than 12 minutes to assess whether the person was legally qualified to vote. Martínez-Olguín said those time limits increased the risk of error.
The Department of Justice was separately demanding detailed, unredacted voter-roll data from states and had sued 30 states that refused. The department had lost each of those cases so far, the judge noted. For states that refused to share their records, the administration sought “unreliable commercial versions of voter roll data,” Martínez-Olguín said.
The plaintiffs said some U.S. citizens felt they had been wrongly identified and investigated as part of the inquiry. Martínez-Olguín said those fears “are well understood as intimidation” and had chilled people from attending campaign events and working as poll monitors during the election.
The lawsuit was filed by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, together with the Voto Latino Foundation, San Francisco and Santa Clara County.
In response to the ruling, the Department of Homeland Security issued an email statement on Thursday saying it was focused on “removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens.” The department added: “We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”
Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer representing the unions and voter group, said the ruling affirmed their position. “It was clear from the start that DHS built its lists on bad data, never checked how often it was wrong, and recklessly sent agents to people’s homes weeks before an election,” he said.
Details of the investigation, known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” came to light last month after Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader of New York, and Alex Padilla, the Democratic California senator, released a whistleblower report about it.
The investigation unfolded as the Trump administration searched for noncitizen voters across the country in the months before the midterm elections. The Guardian reported that the administration had signaled a widespread problem even though its own investigations had shown it was rare.