“Congress did not confer a general auditing power to the DOJ over state election officials,” the judge said.
A federal judge has rejected the U.S. Department of Justice’s effort to compel Illinois to release sensitive information about the state’s approximately 8.3 million registered voters.
According to The Chicago Tribune, U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless of the Central District of Illinois dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice on Friday, meaning that it cannot be amended or refiled at some later date. In a 14-page decision, Lawless found that the Trump administration lacks authority to demand that Illinois share its voter rolls.
“We’ll let the order speak for itself,” Illinois Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich told the Tribune in an email statement.
The lawsuit, filed just over a half-year ago, sought to compel state election officials to share certain records with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. These records would have included “the current electronic copy of Illinois computerized statewide voter registration list, with all fields, including each registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, and either their state driver’s license number, the last four digs of their Social Security number,” or some other unique identifier.
Democracy Docket notes that, prior to the decision, Illinois had already provided the Justice Department with a redacted version of its voter list. The Trump administration rejected this list, reiterating its demands that it be accompanied by personally-identifying information.
In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice suggested it had a right to such records under the Civil Rights Act of 1960—a claim flatly rejected by Lawless, who said that the federal statute in question does not grant the federal government a particular right to obtain live voter databases owned and managed by individual states.
“The Board possesses the list by its own creation,” Lawless wrote. “The Board did not come into its possession.”
Ultimately, Lawless found that the department’s stated goal—determining whether Illinois’s voter-registration lists comply with federal law—does not constitute a permitted, legitimate purpose under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
“Congress did not confer a general auditing power to the DOJ over state election officials,” Lawless said.
Sources
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