By Luc Cohen
Aug 7 (Reuters) - The Trump administration's streak of courtroom defeats in its effort to obtain state voter rolls reached 21 this year when a judge ruled this week that states are not required to share the records with the federal government.
With President Donald Trump's Republicans defending slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, his administration has mounted an aggressive effort to expand federal oversight of elections ahead of the November 3 midterms.
Trump argues that widespread
noncitizen voting is benefiting the Democratic Party, even though state audits and independent studies have found noncitizen voting to be rare.
A Reuters investigation found that just 129 people have been prosecuted for noncitizen voting since a law criminalizing it was passed in 1996, and that most of those cases stemmed from voter confusion or miscommunication with election officials rather than any conspiracy.
Repeatedly, and as recently as this week, judges have found the U.S. Constitution gives states primary responsibility for running federal elections and that federal voting laws do not require them to hand over the 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," U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote on Thursday in dismissing a Justice Department bid to obtain unredacted voter rolls from Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states that refused to comply with its requests to turn over voter rolls containing information including birthdays and partial Social Security numbers.
The administration has paired its court campaign with threats to withhold some disaster funds from states that do not use a federal system for verifying voters' citizenship, and has sought to restrict who can receive mail ballots.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement on Monday: "Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote is a core function of government, and states have an obligation to maintain accurate voter rolls."
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT APPEALS LOSSES
The Justice Department's 21 losses since January have come from federal judges across the country appointed by presidents of both parties, including Democratic-governed states such as California and Republican-led ones such as West Virginia.
It could still prevail in any of nine similar cases pending.
The department has appealed 16 losses. It has lost one appeal; on June 24, a three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the department's lawsuit against Michigan. The department has asked all the court's active judges to hear the case.
It may also ask the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservative justices hold a 6-3 majority, to consider cases it loses on appeal, though there would be no guarantee the court would take up any case.
The administration has taken further steps that voting-rights groups and Democrats describe as coercive.
In early July, Dhillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning they could face criminal charges if they knowingly allowed non-U.S. citizens to remain on their voter rolls.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security said it would withhold some disaster relief funds from states that do not run voter rolls through the federal immigration database SAVE.
Separately, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to let it enforce an executive order requiring DHS to compile lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and limiting mail ballots to voters on those lists. A federal judge blocked the order in several states, saying federal agencies lack the ability to accurately compile such lists. The court has yet to rule.
Don Palmer, senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department elections lawyer, said the broad campaign reflected the priority the administration places on identifying noncitizens and sharing that information with the states.
JUDGE CITES 'FISHING EXPEDITION'
Justice Department lawyers have said in court filings and hearings that the department plans to compare states' voter lists with SAVE to identify non-U.S. citizens registered to vote.
Democrats and voting rights groups say SAVE's information on whether someone is a U.S. citizen can be unreliable.
In a June 27 order denying the administration's bid to obtain Pennsylvania's voter list, Pittsburgh-based U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon, an Obama appointee, said the federal government was on a "fishing expedition" to "advance unsubstantiated claims of non-citizen voting."
The Justice Department has appealed Bissoon's ruling to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has yet to schedule a hearing for the case.
Lis Frost, an elections lawyer with Elias Law Group, said the administration could point to its inability to obtain several states' voter rolls to try to undermine public confidence and lay the rhetorical groundwork to challenge Republican losses in the midterms.
"They’ll make up lies about made-up suspicions about the voter rolls," said Frost, whose firm frequently represents the Democratic Party in court.
A Justice Department spokesperson cited a July 17 Department of Homeland Security finding that more than 250,000 potential noncitizens were registered to vote in four states, as well as New Jersey's disclosure that 400 noncitizens cast ballots after being mistakenly registered between 2023 and 2024.
DHS did not say how many of the 250,000 were actually noncitizens, how many voted or how it reached that figure. More than 4 million people voted in New Jersey in the 2024 presidential election, and the state's Democratic governor said there was no evidence the ballots affected any election outcome.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)
