A federal judge in California has restricted the Department of Homeland Security's election-related field operations in nine states, ruling that the agency's voter-fraud crackdown relies on flawed data and likely amounts to voter intimidation, according to the Associated Press.
In a 19-page order issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín barred DHS officers in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin from conducting field interviews and operations targeting people they know, suspect or should reasonably suspect are U.S. citizens. The New York Times reported that the judge found error-prone government lists could sweep American citizens into the effort.
At issue is a voter-matching program built from tens of millions of records — 48.2 million from independent sources the judge called of "questionable provenance" plus another 50.6 million from official state voter rolls or commercial copies of them, according to court documents cited by the Associated Press. The judge noted that reviewers during the fall surge had to complete at least 40 reviews each with no more than 12 minutes to clear someone from the target list, and that no federal database definitively captures the citizenship status of U.S. residents.
Martínez-Olguín found the operation likely violates the Voting Rights Act, which bars voter intimidation, writing that the government's use of unreliable data along with highly publicized arrests created "an objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements" that could discourage citizens from helping others vote. The case was brought by the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, and the Voto Latino Foundation.
The judge stayed her own order until 5 p.m. Friday, October 23, to give the Trump administration time to seek review in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If it survives, the injunction stays in force until polls close on November 3. DHS may continue investigating people it believes are genuine noncitizens, but with the midterms 12 days out, the ruling narrows how aggressively the administration can pursue its claims of widespread noncitizen voting — claims that experts note are backed by extremely rare documented cases.