The Trump administration has suffered 21 court defeats this year in its push to obtain state voter rolls, with judges repeatedly ruling that states are not required to hand the records to the federal government.
The campaign comes as President Donald Trump’s Republicans defend narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress ahead of the 3 November midterm elections, reports Reuters.
Trump argues that widespread noncitizen voting benefits Democrats, although state audits and independent studies have found such voting to be rare.
A Reuters investigation found only 129 prosecutions for noncitizen voting since it was criminalised in 1996, with most cases linked to confusion or miscommunication rather than organised fraud.
Judges have repeatedly ruled that the US Constitution gives states primary responsibility for administering federal elections and that federal voting laws do not require them to surrender voter records.
“If the Department disagrees with Congress’s judgment as to the records necessary to carry out its enforcement duties … it needs to lodge that objection with Congress,” US District Judge Randolph Moss wrote on Thursday while dismissing a Justice Department attempt to obtain unredacted voter rolls from Washington, DC.
The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states that refused requests for voter rolls containing information including birthdays and partial Social Security numbers.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said on Monday: “Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote is a core function of government, and states have an obligation to maintain accurate voter rolls.”
The department’s 21 losses since January have come before judges appointed by presidents from both parties and include cases involving Democratic-led California and Republican-led West Virginia. Nine similar cases remain pending.
The department has appealed 16 defeats but has already lost one appeal. On 24 June, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of its lawsuit against Michigan. The administration could eventually seek Supreme Court review.
The administration has also threatened to withhold some disaster relief funding from states that do not use the federal SAVE immigration database to verify citizenship and has sought restrictions on mail ballots.
In June, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon rejected the administration’s attempt to obtain Pennsylvania’s voter list, describing it as a “fishing expedition” to “advance unsubstantiated claims of non-citizen voting.”
Voting-rights lawyer Lis Frost said the administration could use its failure to secure voter rolls to cast doubt on election results. “They’ll make up lies about made-up suspicions about the voter rolls,” Frost said.
The Justice Department cited a Homeland Security finding of more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered in four states, though DHS did not establish how many were actually noncitizens or had voted.
