Congress Left the Rolls With the States

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Justice Department’s policy of gathering states’ unredacted voter rolls and running them against a federal immigration database is unlawful. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the US District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a 78-page opinion that the department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” CBS News reported. The case, Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice, was brought by the advocacy group Common Cause and four individual voters, according to the opinion and an ACLU release.

What the judge decided

The opinion says the Civil Rights Division launched the policy to carry out Executive Order 14248, the president’s March 2025 order on election administration. Sooknanan held that the statutes the department cited do not authorize it, that it is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, and that it violates the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act. The Guardian summarised the core of it: Congress gave states, not the federal government, control over maintaining voter rolls. “Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” she wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

She also found that the department had violated the Privacy Act by “improperly disclosing records,” and that it “entirely failed to consider the risk that its use of citizenship records known to be unreliable would lead the Civil Rights Division to demand that states remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls.” She pointed to two Texas voters, the plaintiff Anthony Nel and a Common Cause member, whose registrations were cancelled after the modified federal database failed to confirm their citizenship. The opinion notes that the Social Security Administration has long recognised that its citizenship data contains “certain inaccuracies.”

The remedy is vacatur, not a narrower order. CBS reported that the ruling applies both to the voter files the department has already received and to those it is still litigating over. The opinion says the department asked 49 states and the District of Columbia for their lists and that at least 18 fully cooperated; the Guardian reported that those states handed over full names, birth dates, residential addresses, and driver’s licence numbers or the last four digits of social security numbers.

What the ruling leaves alone

Sooknanan wrote that her decision “does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls,” nor does it prevent states from maintaining their own, and that it “does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections,” she wrote. The Trump administration argues that more federal scrutiny is needed to keep noncitizens off the rolls and to curb fraud; CBS added that most election experts say both are extremely rare. The department has said it needs the data to ensure states comply with the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.

Timing limits the effect on the midterms. CBS noted that federal law bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, so the practical impact of recent rulings on November may be small. The opinion says the department sued 30 states that refused to provide their lists, and a CBS News analysis found it has lost almost all of those suits, with one state settling. More than two dozen judges have denied its requests to compel individual states to share voter lists, CBS said.

A second ruling in the background

The immigration database at the centre of the dispute is the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE. Sooknanan ruled in June that the overhauled version, which includes Social Security Administration data, was created unlawfully, CBS reported, and the opinion records that the Supreme Court stayed that ruling on 25 September. The two rulings concern the same database but are separate: one is about how the database was built, the other about how the department used state voter files.

The opinion restates where the statutes put authority over who is on a state’s list. The federal government may take what Sooknanan called “lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls.” It may not, on her reading, decide who gets to vote.

Sources

Quotations from the ruling, its holdings, the executive order, the plaintiffs, the two removed voters, the 49 requests, the 18 cooperating states, the 30 lawsuits and the date of the Supreme Court stay are from the opinion itself (Common Cause v. DOJ, No. 26-cv-1352, filed 9 October 2026), checked against CBS News and the Guardian. The scope of the vacatur over files already received, the lost suits, the two dozen judges, the 90-day rule and the June SAVE ruling are from CBS News. The list of data fields is from the Guardian. The case name is also confirmed by the ACLU’s release.