Federal Judge Rules Justice Department’s Nationwide Voter-Roll Audit Unlawful

Introduction

A federal judge in Washington has ruled that the Justice Department’s nationwide campaign to collect state voter registration lists and screen them against a federal immigration database was unlawful, finding that the department exceeded its legal authority and understated the danger of wrongly stripping eligible American citizens of their right to vote.

In a 78-page opinion issued on Friday, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck down what the department internally called its “list maintenance project,” siding with the watchdog group Common Cause, which had challenged the programme, according to Reuters. The ruling goes beyond the dozens of state-by-state cases in which courts have already rejected the department’s attempts to force election officials to hand over sensitive voter data — Sooknanan invalidated the nationwide policy itself.

The judge found that the Justice Department had violated federal law in the way it demanded that states produce non-public voter information, then planned to use that material to identify alleged non-citizens on the rolls and instruct states to remove them, CNN reported. She wrote that the administration had downplayed the risk that its methods would wrongfully disenfranchise eligible citizens, despite evidence that the immigration database at the heart of the programme, known as SAVE, could be inaccurate.

“The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote, adding that Congress had left that authority with the states, according to multiple reports of the ruling. The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision.

A sweeping demand to nearly every state

The programme at the centre of the case grew out of President Donald Trump’s directive last year that the Justice Department crack down on voting by ineligible people, even though research has consistently shown that voter fraud is rare in the United States. In the months that followed, the department demanded unredacted voter registration lists from nearly all 50 states, including sensitive personal information, in order to compare the names against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, the Associated Press reported.

SAVE is a federal immigration database designed to help government agencies verify a person’s immigration status, most commonly in the administration of public benefits. The administration sought to use it for a different purpose: identifying registered voters whose citizenship status might warrant further review.

Eighteen states, mostly led by Republicans, complied with the department’s demand and turned over their voter files. The department then cross-checked that data against SAVE and flagged people it identified as possible non-citizens for potential removal from the voter rolls, according to the reporting. The department also sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., over their refusal to provide voter data — 26 of those cases have been dismissed.

Sooknanan concluded that the database was an unreliable instrument for the job. She found that SAVE could contain outdated citizenship records, potentially misidentifying naturalised American citizens as non-citizens and setting in motion removals that the voters themselves might never know about until they arrived at a polling place.

A stinging rebuke of the Civil Rights Division

The opinion did not stop at the programme’s legal mechanics. Sooknanan delivered a sharp critique of what she described as the Justice Department’s attempt to subvert the civil rights laws the department is supposed to enforce, accusing the department of trying to run “roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” CNN reported.

Her 78-page opinion is a stinging rebuke of how the administration has shifted the priorities of the Justice Department, specifically its Civil Rights Division — historically, in her words, standing at “the forefront of the federal government’s efforts to protect Americans’ right to vote.” When Trump returned to the White House last year, the department abandoned several high-profile voting rights cases as political appointees pushed out career staff from the division, and for the past year much of the voting section’s public work has been focused on obtaining state voter rolls in a hunt for non-citizen voters — long a fixation of the president’s claims about election fraud.

“Generations of Civil Rights Division attorneys and staff have worked to protect that right — a sacred right that gives our citizenry a say in its government and secures all other individual rights against government interference,” Sooknanan wrote, according to CNN. “Against that backdrop, this case is anomalous.” Sooknanan was appointed to the federal bench by President Joe Biden.

What the ruling reaches — and what it does not

The decision’s reach is significant in one important respect: because the court vacated the nationwide policy itself rather than ruling only on individual state disputes, the Justice Department is barred from continuing to use the voter files that cooperating states already handed over as part of the programme — including sharing them with the Department of Homeland Security, running them through citizenship databases, or using the results to press states to remove voters, according to Democracy Docket’s account of the ruling.

That detail could carry serious implications for the 18 states that voluntarily provided their files. Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division who worked on voting rights, wrote on social media that the decision “effectively confirms that for the 18 states that submitted files willingly, whoever collected the files at DOJ Civil Rights committed federal crimes,” Democracy Docket reported.

At the same time, the judge made clear that the ruling does not prevent states from maintaining accurate voter rolls themselves or conducting their own citizenship checks — including through the use of the SAVE database. Nor does it bar the federal government from pursuing election oversight through lawful means, the Associated Press noted.

Civil rights advocates welcomed the ruling. Ming Cheung, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said the decision made clear that the administration could not use the federal government to disrupt elections or put voters’ rights at risk. “The Trump administration has repeatedly taken extreme measures to interfere with how elections are run, undermine confidence in the results, and create confusion,” Cheung said in a statement.

A second front at the Supreme Court

Friday’s ruling is not the only legal battle over the SAVE database. In a separate case in June, Sooknanan blocked the administration from using an expanded version of SAVE to check the accuracy of voter rolls — and the US Supreme Court temporarily paused that order last month, Reuters reported. That pause suggests the justices are willing to intervene in the dispute, and Friday’s far broader ruling on the nationwide programme is likely to travel a similar path toward the high court.

Federal law also imposes its own constraint on the calendar. The National Voter Registration Act bars systematic voter-roll removal programmes in the 90 days before a federal election — a window that already applies with the midterm elections scheduled for November 3 — which could limit the practical effect of any appeal before polling day, according to election-law reporting on the case.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The most striking feature of Sooknanan’s ruling is not its outcome — courts have been rejecting the voter-roll demands for months — but the story it tells about institutional inversion. The Civil Rights Division was created to pry open the machinery of American democracy for citizens the system had locked out. Friday’s opinion describes a division pointed in the opposite direction: using the machinery of federal civil-rights enforcement to decide, in the judge’s words, “who gets to vote.” That is why the opinion reads less like a technical dispute over statutory authority and more like an obituary for a mission. The word “anomalous” does a great deal of work in her text — it frames the programme not as a policy disagreement but as a break in the institution’s own continuity.

Second, the case exposes the quiet violence of an unreliable database. SAVE was built to answer a narrow administrative question — is this person eligible for this benefit? — and the administration repurposed it to answer a far more consequential one: is this person a citizen entitled to vote? Databases built for benefits administration are optimised to avoid paying ineligible claimants; their errors fall on people being denied services. Transplanted into voter-roll maintenance, the error structure flips: a false match no longer denies a benefit, it deletes a citizen. Naturalised Americans — precisely the citizens whose records are most likely to lag behind their actual status — sit in the blast radius. Sooknanan’s core factual finding, that the department understated this risk, is really a finding about asymmetric error: the costs of being wrong fall on voters, while the political benefits of being aggressive accrue to the administration.

Third, the calendar is doing quiet work here. With the midterms on November 3 and the 90-day quiet period already in force, the practical window for systematic federal removals before polling day was nearly closed regardless of this ruling. The fight, then, is not really about November — it is about precedent and about 2027 and beyond. If the department can establish that it may vacuum up every state’s voter file and run it against an immigration database, the legal infrastructure of American election administration changes permanently. Friday’s ruling denies that infrastructure its foundation.

Fourth, watch the federalism fault line. The opinion’s sharpest sentence — that this was “the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote” — lands in a country where election administration has always been a state function, jealously guarded across party lines. The fact that 26 of the department’s 30 refusal lawsuits have been dismissed, and that even cooperating states now face the argument that their cooperation may have facilitated federal crimes, suggests the courts are policing this boundary with unusual unanimity. That unanimity is the administration’s real problem: it is not one judge in Washington, but a pattern of judges, in case after case, reaching the same conclusion.

Finally, the Supreme Court looms over everything. The justices have already paused Sooknanan’s narrower June order on the expanded SAVE database, which signals a willingness to engage — and possibly to cabin — her reasoning. Whether the department appeals Friday’s ruling, seeks an emergency stay, and how the high court treats the 90-day window will determine whether this opinion is the end of the list-maintenance project or merely its first serious defeat.

What to watch next

First, the department’s response: officials said only that they were reviewing the ruling. An appeal to the D.C. Circuit, and possibly an emergency request to stay the order, would be the expected next steps — and any stay application would test whether the courts consider the programme’s dismantling urgent or reversible.

Second, the Supreme Court’s handling of the already-paused June SAVE order will signal how the justices view the use of immigration databases in election administration generally. A decision there would frame any appeal of Friday’s broader ruling.

Third, the data trail: the 18 states that turned over their files, and any data already shared with the Department of Homeland Security, now sit under a vacated policy. Whether states demand their files back — and whether the department complies — is an unresolved practical question.

Fourth, the election calendar: with the midterms less than a month away and the 90-day quiet period in force, the litigation will now run on a parallel track to the campaign, and any further federal action on voter rolls will be measured against both the courts and the clock.

Sources

• Reuters: “US judge rules Justice Department use of voter rolls unlawful” (October 9, 2026)
• CNN: “Justice Department ran ‘roughshod’ over civil rights with plans to audit state voter rolls, judge says” (October 9, 2026)
• Associated Press (via Newsmax): “Federal Judge Rejects Trump Push to Collect State Voter Rolls” (October 9, 2026)
• Democracy Docket: “Federal judge shuts down Trump DOJ’s nationwide voter roll crusade, even in states that cooperated” (October 9, 2026)