Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the federal court in Washington ruled on 9 October that the Department of Justice (DOJ) acted unlawfully in collecting state voter rolls, running them through SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), the federal citizenship database, and demanding removals1. "The challenged policy represents the federal government's attempt to decide who gets to vote," she wrote in a 78-page ruling in Common Cause v. Department of Justice. The ruling decides part of the case on the law, without a trial.
Sooknanan is the judge whose June ruling against the modified SAVE System the Supreme Court stayed by 6-3. That stay let bulk citizenship checks resume; this ruling goes after a different link in the chain, what DOJ does with the system's output once it has a state's roll. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), among the plaintiffs' lawyers, says the ruling vacates a policy "that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states"2.
The ruling adds to a run of DOJ losses in its campaign for state voter lists. By the count of the Brennan Center, a voting-rights think tank at New York University's law school, the government has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for those lists, and 26 suits have been dismissed3. DOJ said it was reviewing the decision4.
