Judge halts Trump administration plan to screen voters before midterms

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a temporary order on Monday that stops the Trump administration from sending states lists of registered voters identified as potential noncitizens. The ruling prevents the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from demanding that state officials separate or withhold the ballots of those individuals until citizenship is verified.

The decision halts a strategy that the administration argued was necessary to enforce federal laws against noncitizen voting. Critics of the plan warned that the process could disenfranchise eligible voters and interfere with the states' traditional role in managing their own elections. This legal move comes just hours before the November 3 midterms, where Republicans are fighting to keep control of both chambers of Congress.

The administration’s pressure campaign intensified over the past month with letters sent to election officials in California and Washington. Those letters demanded that state officials not count ballots from people on the federal lists. Voting rights and privacy groups filed the lawsuit, alleging the administration violated the Privacy Act of 1974 by disclosing sensitive personal information.

In a court filing on Saturday, the Justice Department stated that its letters were an effort to enforce existing federal law rather than a new policy subject to judicial review. Chutkan rejected this view, noting that the administration’s data might not be reliable. She determined that this unreliability created a real risk that lawfully registered voters would be prevented from counting their votes.

The outcome is part of a mixed bag of results for the White House. While Chutkan blocked the list-sharing initiative, a panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco cleared the government to threaten state and local election officials with prosecution for noncompliance. Chutkan’s ruling is not bound by that appellate decision.

Other federal judges have issued conflicting orders in related cases. A judge in Los Angeles rejected the Justice Department's request to set aside mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters in California. Separately, a San Francisco judge ordered the department to stop threatening prosecution of local officials who did not follow the administration's demands.

The legal battles center on the claim that noncitizen voting is illegal but exceedingly rare. President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that fraud, specifically noncitizen voting, caused his loss in the 2020 presidential election. He has accused states of facilitating this practice despite being the primary administrators of their own election systems.