The Department of Justice accidentally revealed the real motive behind its demand for 40 states' voter rolls, a Nevada judge noted.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Anne Traum tossed a case by the DOJ that sought to take Nevada's voter rolls in a crusade by President Donald Trump ahead of the midterms. The Trump DOJ is now 0-for-22 in its lawsuits seeking to grab state voter rolls.
In the order dismissing the DOJ's lawsuit against Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, Traum highlighted a concession buried in the Trump administration's own paperwork. She noted that it tied the voter-roll grab, which the administration called a push for "voter integrity," to Trump's deportation agenda.
According to the ruling, a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion admitted the government was seeking states' "full, unredacted voter rolls to ensure that they 'are complying with Congress's demand to remove those who are ineligible to vote from their rolls - whether due to illegal presence in this country or otherwise.'"
The same OLC opinion went further by conceding that "this activity may have incidental immigration consequences by providing [the Department of Homeland Security] updated information regarding the location of illegal aliens," Traum noted.
DHS is the parent agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been detaining and deporting record levels of immigrants and has generated controversy over its violent enforcement tactics.
The admission undercut the DOJ's stated rationale, according to Traum. The Trump administration had insisted Nevada "must" hand over a voter file containing "all fields, including the registrant's full name, date of birth, residential address," and either a driver's license number or partial Social Security number, according to the order. Aguilar's office rejected the demand as "unprecedented in its scope, its [lack of] purported basis, and its purported urgency."
Traum found the DOJ never justified the request at all in two letters it sent to Aguilar. Neither, she wrote, "purported to allege facts showing a need for an investigation into Nevada's state election system." Quoting a parallel ruling, she said the government provided "no basis—none."
