Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
We are starting with some good news for a change.
The DOJ has just been handed two more court losses in its flailing campaign to seize voter data from the states, bringing the grand total of court losses to 11. The Justice Department sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. in an unheard of attempt to seize unredacted lists of statewide voter registration data, which includes the sensitive and personal data of every person who is registered to vote in the state.
Not one judge has sided with the DOJ’s arguments thus far in court.
On Saturday, a federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit against Pennsylvania. On Monday, a federal judge similarly dismissed the DOJ’s case against New Hampshire.
These latest defeats are, respectively, the DOJ’s tenth and eleventh losses to date, in the administration’s ongoing, struggling campaign to trample on states’ rights to administer their own elections and seize voter data from 44 states and Washington D.C. Very few states complied with the DOJ’s initial demands for the information, so it has been trying to compel states to hand over the data via lawsuits. It has so far lost every single case that has gone to court.
The data the DOJ is after includes sensitive information like drivers licenses and Social Security numbers — personal identifying information that the federal government is not entitled to.
To make its case, the DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to argue it is allowed to seize the information. But, as the courts have found time and time again, none of these statutes give the federal government the authority to demand state’s voter rolls.
“The Department of Justice does not have any congressional authorization or any legal right to seize the sensitive data from these states,” explained David Becker, a former lawyer in the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
The federal judges in the most recent cases have agreed with the findings of the judges in previous states: the DOJ’s argument that the CRA and HAVA gives them the right to demand sensitive voter information does not work.
“Through the present administration, the government seeks to compel the production of highly sensitive personal identifiers held within the Commonwealth’s voter rolls,” U.S. District Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in her ruling on Saturday. “The Constitution’s Elections Clause notwithstanding, the government claims that its incursion is required to confirm the state’s compliance with federal election law. What, a reader rhetorically may ask, could possibly go wrong?”
“...the government has failed to demonstrate entitlement to Pennsylvania voters’ personal identifiers under the NVRA or HAVA. The various Motions to Dismiss will be granted, and the dismissal is with prejudice,” she added.
In his ruling on Monday in the New Hampshire case, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante similarly wrote “that a state’s failure to disclose information, including the SVRA, does not on its own constitute a substantive violation giving rise to a claim for relief under HAVA.”
With so many losses, you might be thinking, why isn’t the Justice Department just dropping this whole ridiculous gambit?
One reason the DOJ soldiers on with this failing campaign is likely because the DOJ “doesn't seem to have the ability to tell its one and only client, the president, which is, by the way, not supposed to be the client of the Department of Justice, ‘hey, these are bad cases,’” Becker said.
“There's no one at the Department of Justice who will stand up for the rule of law and speak truth to their audience of one,” Becker added, “they're going to keep racking up defeats.”
There’s a lot more to unpack this week, let’s dig in.
— Khaya Himmelman
