NEW YORK, Oct 9 (Reuters) – A US judge ruled on Friday that the Justice Department’s push to obtain state voter rolls and check them against a federal immigration database in order to demand that states remove voters it deemed ineligible was unlawful.
Washington-based US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote that the Justice Department had downplayed the risk that its practice would wrongfully disenfranchise eligible US citizens despite evidence that the immigration database, known as SAVE, could be inaccurate.
In a separate case, Sooknanan blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from using an expanded version of the SAVE database to check the accuracy of voter rolls. The US Supreme Court has temporarily paused that decision.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York)
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